(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.)
(K)
Date: 2022-09-18 10:25 pm (UTC)I used to wish I could just get the classroom teachers to read the Beast Academy guidebooks from end to end.
And yes, the classroom teachers were being paid $60K/year in a place where a standard 2-bedroom apartment rented for $3K/month.
Re: (K)
Date: 2022-09-20 04:36 am (UTC)And yes, the classroom teachers were being paid $60K/year in a place where a standard 2-bedroom apartment rented for $3K/month.
...wow.
Re: (K)
Date: 2022-09-20 05:41 am (UTC)Me: What's 3 pencils plus 4 pencils?
Students: 7 pencils
Me: What's 3 ducks plus 4 ducks?
Students: 7 ducks
Me: What's 3 tens plus 4 tens?
Students: 7 tens
Me: What's 30 plus 40?
Students: 70
Me: What's 3x plus 4x?
Students: 7x
Me: What's 3 fives plus 4 fives?
Students: 7 fives
Me: What's 15 plus 20?
Students: 35
Me: What's 3 ducks plus 4 cows?
Students: 3 ducks and 4 cows!
Me: What's 3 hundreds plus 4 tens?
Students: 340!
etc.
It varied depending on my mood, and got used for the distributive property, units, variables, etc. I think the original inspiration was Fred. Was I going to send you the Fred books and then forgot?
Re: (K)
Date: 2022-09-22 04:26 am (UTC)I did do a similar thing with A. after he told me all of that, because I wanted to make sure he understood what was going on -- I asked him if 3 sevens plus 2 sevens (or something like that) was 5 sevens, and told him that sevens were just like... crackers! Then I asked him about 3 sevens plus 2 eights and asked if you could do the same thing.
A: ????
Me: It's like 3 crackers and 2 candies... you can't really. Or then would they have to be crandies?
A: CRANDIES! *thinks this is the funniest thing he's ever heard*
You told me about the Fred books! I don't know that you were going to send them to me, though. They sound awesome.