4 ms·

... makes perfect sense in the context of what the teachers are trying to teach ... What's the point with homework then? School takes the best part of a child

by jonsen 9y ago

... makes perfect sense in the context of what the teachers are trying to teach ... What's the point with homework then? School takes the best part of a childs day, and when they don't make it through, the parents can finish with a tired child.

ColinWright 9y ago
"Homework" is supposed to be practising skills they have already learned so they can make it more fluent, and have to concentrate on it less when they come to the next thing to learn. Learning things is done with the teacher there to help anticipate, identify, and correct misconceptions. If you want the parent to help with the homework, the parent will have to know the material they want to help with. In maths, that's rarely the case unless it's the same thing they learned. And that's now out-of-date. Parents say they want their students to learn new, modern maths, and then insist that they are taught exactly what they were taught. And hated. Having said that, I'm really not going to defend anything about the existing setup and system. This is a huge mess, and while I have my own ideas, there's no way a discussion here will change anything, and it's likely that things I do say will be taken out of context, twisted, and mis-understood.
- boblivion 9y ago
  As someone not from the U.S. I wonder, what does "outdated" mean? Can you give a simple example - e.g. comparison - what would be "math back then" and "math nowadays". Because to me math was always just math especially if it comes to numbers.
  - throwawaybbqed 9y ago
    I wanted to echo the parent poster. I'm in my 30s and math made no sense as a kid - precisely because the problems were all artificial and uninteresting. I had to fight major math phobia in undergrad. For me personally, the most interesting application of math was figuring out orbits/positions of stars, etc. I have a 2 year old so if you have another favorite example like this, I'd love to hear about it.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      > the most interesting application of math was figuring out orbits/positions of stars. For me math started to click when I started writing simple games for the spectrum, I realized quite quickly that what I needed was trigonometry and once I knew the name I could go to the library and get out books. I was implementing a text based destroyer game (similar to mtrek/jtre though I didn't know those existed) and I had to implement handling bearings from the ship to the enemy ships, handle firing guns and missiles all that stuff, I made lots of horrible simplifications (shells experienced no air resistance so flew in perfect parabola's, the surface of the sea was a perfectly flat plane, no curvature (non-euclidean geometry would have been a step too far at 10-11) etc) but fundamentally it worked and was playable as a game, you could issue orders, fire shells (and later missiles though that made the game a lot more brutal and short) with bracketing and taking into time of flight - I was a strange child. I got the original idea from a ZX81 kids book on game programming that implemented a simple side projection game where you set the elevation and velocity of your shot and aimed for the opponents ship, it was simple (couple of pages of code) and I wanted to do something a bit more realistic - as a side benefit I ended up reading up on naval warfare in quite a lot of depth, again a strange child.
  - watwut 9y ago
    You can teach multiplication as "here memorize that" or as "here is set of trics how to derive result" or even entirely diffreently. Likewise with addition. You can mostly memorize that or you can tech them how to simplifie calculations. Thing like "17+5" is actually "17+3+2" which is easier to calculate.
  - sethammons 9y ago
    Here is one potential example from a number of years back. Maybe it counts as "back then." My daughter's algebra teacher was teaching the laws of exponents. When faced with "what is x^0," the teacher gave axiomatic reasoning of "x^0 is always 1. Nobody knows why, you just have to memorize it." When I confronted him about it, his response was along the lines of "we don't have time to get into concepts and teach reasons; we need students to memorize and move on to the next thing for the state tests." More and more, educators in the US are realizing that memorizing things just wont work. You get students who can't recall if x^0 is 0, 1, or x, and they lack the mental model to figure out the answer. Math nowadays strives to give students the mental models to derive answers. I would hope today's students to go "I know x^3 is xxx, and x^2 is xx, so x^1 is x, so the pattern is divide by x, so x^0 must by x/x or 1". This applies to even more common things. Many of us who did well in math did so because we saw patterns and relationships. Now educators are striving to help students see those patterns and relationships. In similar fashion, and to address a concern a few comments up, many older US students (and adults for that matter) can't figure out percents. They were taught a formula of [base * percent / 100] and then they have to unpack the term "percent," where they remember there was something divided by 100, and then they find themselves all mixed up because of failed memorization methods. I can recall in grade school and high school, many kids did not realize they could find 20% of something by multiplying it by 0.2. They first would multiply by 20, then divide by 100, and when I told them they could just combine those two steps, their mental model would break. It got even worse if you tried to tell them "what is 1/10th of the item? now double that, and you'll have 20%". To summarize, "outdated" vs "nowadays," the students would try to add algorithmic steps to their mental tool box that work in very specific situations, and now, many educators are trying to help children internalize concepts. [edit, formatting. I wanted the xxx and xx to originally have an asterisk between them to show multiplication, but then everything went italic. Why does formatting have to be such a pain?]
    - ghaff 9y ago
      >Nobody knows why, you just have to memorize it. While that's clearly a bad answer, it's not clear that an answer to the effect of: "That's a great question but answering it requires getting into a number of somewhat advanced topics. But if you're interested, here's a good place to start." would be. Personally, I actually could not tell you the answer myself--although I could look it up. I agree that, where practical, understanding "why" is preferable. But, even in more advanced subjects, you sometimes just don't have the basics to derive everything from first principles. High school physics is an obvious case when most students haven't had any calculus yet. But even intro courses at a lot of good colleges often ask you to accept certain things as true because understanding why they're true requires significantly more background in the subject.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    Here's a simple example: Is sqrt(2)/2 or 1/sqrt(2) in "simplest form"? The answer depends on whether you have a calculator handy. Because computing sqrt(2)/2 from a square root table and the long division algorithm is a lot easier than doing 1/sqrt(2). But on a calculator, 1/sqrt(2) is just as easy and it's simpler to write. But at least as of the last 90s we were definitely teaching kids to put their radicals in rational-denominator form for basically "magic" reasons: the students had no idea why, and I suspect neither did most of the teachers.
michaelchisari 9y ago
I don't mind this new way of teaching math, but on this note, I liked what Sal Khan had to say about flipping the process for school and homework. He proposed that students should watch lectures at home with a few problems for familiarity, and that classroom time should be spent working through problems in a guided environment. This allows students to pause, rewind, rewatch, etc. the lectures and move at their own pace, while getting expert guidance on the problems in person (and not relying on parents who may not have even looked at the source material in decades).
- dorchadas 9y ago
  As a math teacher (Algebra II), I think this would be great. The problem is that most of my students won't go home and watch the videos. Either because they can't (lack of internet access, have to work to help support family, etc.) or are just lazy and won't. I've had to quit giving homework, even to the upper level classes, because nobody would do it. They'd just come in the next day and make excuses and have nothing done. This includes when they're homework was just to watch videos explaining problems they missed on a standardized test they took. Most just refused to watch the videos at home. It'd be great if they would watch the lectures and then be able to practice in the hour I see them daily, asking questions to clarify and such. But I can guarantee you it won't happen without a huge shift in the culture of education.
  - sethammons 9y ago
    As a former inner city math teacher, I feel you. Getting students to do _anything_ outside the classroom was practically impossible. What worked for me for homework for a little while was having the students do 5 push ups for each day they missed homework in a row. I suddenly was getting 90%+ participation on students completing their homework! It was fantastic until someone told the VP, and the VP asked me if I was actually doing that, whereby they informed me that it was corporal punishment and absolutely against the rules. I could rant about that for a bit, but I'm sure you can guess what happened after the pushups stopped: homework stopped. As for the shift needed in the culture of education, I totally agree. There needs to be a shift in accountability for the students, their families, and for schools. While there were parents who hoped their kids would do well at the school where I taught, there was a pervasive home attitude of school will get you nowhere. Many of the kids had no role models in their life where they could see any value to education. One VP I knew, in a neighboring district, married into a poorer latino family. They valued hard work, but only really understood hard manual labor type efforts. He was constantly hounded as he was going through schooling by them. "Why are you wasting this time at school? Why are you not doing more to provide for my daughter? Go get a real job." After finally becoming a teacher and then a VP and making more money than any other member of the family he married into, they started to see how education could be an investment. I don't know how you do that on a scale where the majority of socio-economically depressed families and communities can be exposed to the value of education.

by jonsen 9y ago

ColinWright 9y ago

"Homework" is supposed to be practising skills they have already learned so they can make it more fluent, and have to concentrate on it less when they come to the next thing to learn. Learning things is done with the teacher there to help anticipate, identify, and correct misconceptions. If you want the parent to help with the homework, the parent will have to know the material they want to help with. In maths, that's rarely the case unless it's the same thing they learned. And that's now out-of-date. Parents say they want their students to learn new, modern maths, and then insist that they are taught exactly what they were taught. And hated. Having said that, I'm really not going to defend anything about the existing setup and system. This is a huge mess, and while I have my own ideas, there's no way a discussion here will change anything, and it's likely that things I do say will be taken out of context, twisted, and mis-understood.

boblivion 9y ago
As someone not from the U.S. I wonder, what does "outdated" mean? Can you give a simple example - e.g. comparison - what would be "math back then" and "math nowadays". Because to me math was always just math especially if it comes to numbers.
- throwawaybbqed 9y ago
  I wanted to echo the parent poster. I'm in my 30s and math made no sense as a kid - precisely because the problems were all artificial and uninteresting. I had to fight major math phobia in undergrad. For me personally, the most interesting application of math was figuring out orbits/positions of stars, etc. I have a 2 year old so if you have another favorite example like this, I'd love to hear about it.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    > the most interesting application of math was figuring out orbits/positions of stars. For me math started to click when I started writing simple games for the spectrum, I realized quite quickly that what I needed was trigonometry and once I knew the name I could go to the library and get out books. I was implementing a text based destroyer game (similar to mtrek/jtre though I didn't know those existed) and I had to implement handling bearings from the ship to the enemy ships, handle firing guns and missiles all that stuff, I made lots of horrible simplifications (shells experienced no air resistance so flew in perfect parabola's, the surface of the sea was a perfectly flat plane, no curvature (non-euclidean geometry would have been a step too far at 10-11) etc) but fundamentally it worked and was playable as a game, you could issue orders, fire shells (and later missiles though that made the game a lot more brutal and short) with bracketing and taking into time of flight - I was a strange child. I got the original idea from a ZX81 kids book on game programming that implemented a simple side projection game where you set the elevation and velocity of your shot and aimed for the opponents ship, it was simple (couple of pages of code) and I wanted to do something a bit more realistic - as a side benefit I ended up reading up on naval warfare in quite a lot of depth, again a strange child.
- watwut 9y ago
  You can teach multiplication as "here memorize that" or as "here is set of trics how to derive result" or even entirely diffreently. Likewise with addition. You can mostly memorize that or you can tech them how to simplifie calculations. Thing like "17+5" is actually "17+3+2" which is easier to calculate.
- sethammons 9y ago
  Here is one potential example from a number of years back. Maybe it counts as "back then." My daughter's algebra teacher was teaching the laws of exponents. When faced with "what is x^0," the teacher gave axiomatic reasoning of "x^0 is always 1. Nobody knows why, you just have to memorize it." When I confronted him about it, his response was along the lines of "we don't have time to get into concepts and teach reasons; we need students to memorize and move on to the next thing for the state tests." More and more, educators in the US are realizing that memorizing things just wont work. You get students who can't recall if x^0 is 0, 1, or x, and they lack the mental model to figure out the answer. Math nowadays strives to give students the mental models to derive answers. I would hope today's students to go "I know x^3 is xxx, and x^2 is xx, so x^1 is x, so the pattern is divide by x, so x^0 must by x/x or 1". This applies to even more common things. Many of us who did well in math did so because we saw patterns and relationships. Now educators are striving to help students see those patterns and relationships. In similar fashion, and to address a concern a few comments up, many older US students (and adults for that matter) can't figure out percents. They were taught a formula of [base * percent / 100] and then they have to unpack the term "percent," where they remember there was something divided by 100, and then they find themselves all mixed up because of failed memorization methods. I can recall in grade school and high school, many kids did not realize they could find 20% of something by multiplying it by 0.2. They first would multiply by 20, then divide by 100, and when I told them they could just combine those two steps, their mental model would break. It got even worse if you tried to tell them "what is 1/10th of the item? now double that, and you'll have 20%". To summarize, "outdated" vs "nowadays," the students would try to add algorithmic steps to their mental tool box that work in very specific situations, and now, many educators are trying to help children internalize concepts. [edit, formatting. I wanted the xxx and xx to originally have an asterisk between them to show multiplication, but then everything went italic. Why does formatting have to be such a pain?]
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >Nobody knows why, you just have to memorize it. While that's clearly a bad answer, it's not clear that an answer to the effect of: "That's a great question but answering it requires getting into a number of somewhat advanced topics. But if you're interested, here's a good place to start." would be. Personally, I actually could not tell you the answer myself--although I could look it up. I agree that, where practical, understanding "why" is preferable. But, even in more advanced subjects, you sometimes just don't have the basics to derive everything from first principles. High school physics is an obvious case when most students haven't had any calculus yet. But even intro courses at a lot of good colleges often ask you to accept certain things as true because understanding why they're true requires significantly more background in the subject.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  Here's a simple example: Is sqrt(2)/2 or 1/sqrt(2) in "simplest form"? The answer depends on whether you have a calculator handy. Because computing sqrt(2)/2 from a square root table and the long division algorithm is a lot easier than doing 1/sqrt(2). But on a calculator, 1/sqrt(2) is just as easy and it's simpler to write. But at least as of the last 90s we were definitely teaching kids to put their radicals in rational-denominator form for basically "magic" reasons: the students had no idea why, and I suspect neither did most of the teachers.

michaelchisari 9y ago

I don't mind this new way of teaching math, but on this note, I liked what Sal Khan had to say about flipping the process for school and homework. He proposed that students should watch lectures at home with a few problems for familiarity, and that classroom time should be spent working through problems in a guided environment. This allows students to pause, rewind, rewatch, etc. the lectures and move at their own pace, while getting expert guidance on the problems in person (and not relying on parents who may not have even looked at the source material in decades).

dorchadas 9y ago
As a math teacher (Algebra II), I think this would be great. The problem is that most of my students won't go home and watch the videos. Either because they can't (lack of internet access, have to work to help support family, etc.) or are just lazy and won't. I've had to quit giving homework, even to the upper level classes, because nobody would do it. They'd just come in the next day and make excuses and have nothing done. This includes when they're homework was just to watch videos explaining problems they missed on a standardized test they took. Most just refused to watch the videos at home. It'd be great if they would watch the lectures and then be able to practice in the hour I see them daily, asking questions to clarify and such. But I can guarantee you it won't happen without a huge shift in the culture of education.
- sethammons 9y ago
  As a former inner city math teacher, I feel you. Getting students to do _anything_ outside the classroom was practically impossible. What worked for me for homework for a little while was having the students do 5 push ups for each day they missed homework in a row. I suddenly was getting 90%+ participation on students completing their homework! It was fantastic until someone told the VP, and the VP asked me if I was actually doing that, whereby they informed me that it was corporal punishment and absolutely against the rules. I could rant about that for a bit, but I'm sure you can guess what happened after the pushups stopped: homework stopped. As for the shift needed in the culture of education, I totally agree. There needs to be a shift in accountability for the students, their families, and for schools. While there were parents who hoped their kids would do well at the school where I taught, there was a pervasive home attitude of school will get you nowhere. Many of the kids had no role models in their life where they could see any value to education. One VP I knew, in a neighboring district, married into a poorer latino family. They valued hard work, but only really understood hard manual labor type efforts. He was constantly hounded as he was going through schooling by them. "Why are you wasting this time at school? Why are you not doing more to provide for my daughter? Go get a real job." After finally becoming a teacher and then a VP and making more money than any other member of the family he married into, they started to see how education could be an investment. I don't know how you do that on a scale where the majority of socio-economically depressed families and communities can be exposed to the value of education.