(no subject)
Sep. 16th, 2022 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnWELP my kids have been in school... three?... weeks and I have a rant!
I happened to ask A. about his math class today because I'd heard from a friend that A. had been placed in math class with her kid and our conversation made me curious about what math they were doing. A. told me that they were doing more complicated multiplication, and he further told me, in his calm but insistent and somewhat annoyed voice (that kid really does have superior emotional regulation) that his teacher had said he'd done a problem wrong and that he'd really done it right.
So I asked him to write it out for me. This is what he wrote:
(99*497) + (1*497) = __ *497 =
He further explained that the right side of the first equality was his explanation of how to do the problem, not what his teacher said. (He knew that in the blank space went 99 + 1 = 100, and then he could do the problem.) He said his teacher said that was wrong because there were parentheses, so he should do the multiplication of 99 and 497 because that was inside the parentheses. ("But it works!" he said about his method.)
(I think maybe she was trying to see whether he could multiply 99 by 497 -- which I don't think he knows how to do -- but then why not just give him that problem?)
Now, my children are famously unreliable narrators in the sense of being very good at leaving out context (this is the same child who said that his teacher takes balls from him, and we later learned that it was a game that his teacher was playing with all the kids during recess that involved them grabbing balls away from each other) so I should keep my mind open that it might be a misinterpretation or that additional context might make it okay. But... I really rather don't think there's additional context here that makes it okay. I mean, I think the additional context is that (I know from school gossip) his math teacher wasn't originally hired as a math teacher and got pulled into the job at the last minute, because you know, staffing.
We of course told him he had done it correctly and cleverly, and I am additionally pretty happy that he understood he had done it right even though the teacher had told him it was wrong. But ARGH. If I didn't have to work full-time right now (I have to work full-time right now) I would SO be spending some time teaching in our school, because they SO need help with lower-grade math. (Upper-grade math at this school has a lovely awesome teacher. Lower-grade math has been foxed by lack of good math staffing for YEARS. Fortunately for E, the lower-grade math problem happened literally the year after she went to upper-grade math.)
I happened to ask A. about his math class today because I'd heard from a friend that A. had been placed in math class with her kid and our conversation made me curious about what math they were doing. A. told me that they were doing more complicated multiplication, and he further told me, in his calm but insistent and somewhat annoyed voice (that kid really does have superior emotional regulation) that his teacher had said he'd done a problem wrong and that he'd really done it right.
So I asked him to write it out for me. This is what he wrote:
(99*497) + (1*497) = __ *497 =
He further explained that the right side of the first equality was his explanation of how to do the problem, not what his teacher said. (He knew that in the blank space went 99 + 1 = 100, and then he could do the problem.) He said his teacher said that was wrong because there were parentheses, so he should do the multiplication of 99 and 497 because that was inside the parentheses. ("But it works!" he said about his method.)
(I think maybe she was trying to see whether he could multiply 99 by 497 -- which I don't think he knows how to do -- but then why not just give him that problem?)
Now, my children are famously unreliable narrators in the sense of being very good at leaving out context (this is the same child who said that his teacher takes balls from him, and we later learned that it was a game that his teacher was playing with all the kids during recess that involved them grabbing balls away from each other) so I should keep my mind open that it might be a misinterpretation or that additional context might make it okay. But... I really rather don't think there's additional context here that makes it okay. I mean, I think the additional context is that (I know from school gossip) his math teacher wasn't originally hired as a math teacher and got pulled into the job at the last minute, because you know, staffing.
We of course told him he had done it correctly and cleverly, and I am additionally pretty happy that he understood he had done it right even though the teacher had told him it was wrong. But ARGH. If I didn't have to work full-time right now (I have to work full-time right now) I would SO be spending some time teaching in our school, because they SO need help with lower-grade math. (Upper-grade math at this school has a lovely awesome teacher. Lower-grade math has been foxed by lack of good math staffing for YEARS. Fortunately for E, the lower-grade math problem happened literally the year after she went to upper-grade math.)
no subject
Date: 2022-09-17 03:04 pm (UTC)I am reminded of the one time I outperformed expectations on an exam problem in college physics (you know how badly my college physics was taught and how badly I performed), and it was because I realized that what the prof had included as a throwaway remark in the description (Sth like "The total work in the system equals 0") meant the problem could be framed as two simple fraction-adding equations with two variables to solve for, as opposed to this complated mess of physics formulas, and as a result I was the *only* one to finish the problem and get the answer right.
The prof at least had the decency to say that he'd underestimated the amount of time that it would take even the best students (not me!) to brute-force the math, which was what he'd been intending, and he said well done to me for noticing that his throwaway line led to a much more elegant solution that was actually doable by freshmen in the time allotted.
He didn't tell me I'd done it wrong! D:
I wish you could teach math, you would be great at it!
no subject
Date: 2022-09-18 04:12 am (UTC)Heh, thank you for the support -- being really interested in math pedagogy is not really the same as understanding classroom management for 4th graders who (it seems from A.'s report) vary widely in skill and motivation. But at least I would be able to help out the teacher (who presumably knows those things very well) with, well, the actual math part...
no subject
Date: 2022-09-18 10:19 pm (UTC)classroomteam management for engineers and DBAs who vary widely in skill and motivation, lol), and so it's win/win all around.no subject
Date: 2022-09-20 03:47 am (UTC)