Re:Math education: It’s not about numbers, it’s about learni...
by paganel on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @04:00PM
(#14747513)
> By the time people go to high school it is to late
Just anecdotal evidence, I know, but for me it was the exact contrary that happened. As a 5-year old kid I had learn to read all by myself (my dad had taught me to recognize the letters and how to pronounce them), but I had huge conceptual difficulties in teaching myself things like subtraction (what do you mean you can take/subtract a thing from another thing? what happens when the thing which you're taking/subtracting is bigger than the thing from which you're subtracting? you cannot do that, it would result in a non-thing, a thing that is below 0, and all things below 0 technically do not exist).
In elementary and middle-school I was passable in maths, while very good in humanities, but all this changed in high-school, mostly because of my teacher, who taught me (and my colleagues) how to think about math. He's one of the reasons why I decided to pursue a STEM education and why I'm currently a programmer.
Just anecdotal evidence, I know, but for me it was the exact contrary that happened. As a 5-year old kid I had learn to read all by myself (my dad had taught me to recognize the letters and how to pronounce them), but I had huge conceptual difficulties in teaching myself things like subtraction (what do you mean you can take/subtract a thing from another thing? what happens when the thing which you're taking/subtracting is bigger than the thing from which you're subtracting? you cannot do that, it would result in a non-thing, a thing that is below 0, and all things below 0 technically do not exist).
In elementary and middle-school I was passable in maths, while very good in humanities, but all this changed in high-school, mostly because of my teacher, who taught me (and my colleagues) how to think about math. He's one of the reasons why I decided to pursue a STEM education and why I'm currently a programmer.