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Long division is a bad example, as you don't need to know long division... for well... anything. But I did SAT tutoring when I was an undergrad for disadvantag
by kenjackson 16y ago
Long division is a bad example, as you don't need to know long division... for well... anything.
But I did SAT tutoring when I was an undergrad for disadvantaged kids and I used to have serious trouble with a lot of basic concepts that made it really hard to go further.
For example:
1) Some students didn't understand greater than vs less than symbols. They didn't know which direction indicated greater than.
2) Some students didn't know the relationship between the numerator and denominator. 3/2 and 2/3 would be routinely confused. Couple this confusion with (1) above and things get really weird.
3) Area, volume, circumference -- while they knew the concepts they didn't map the terms to the concepts.
4) The relationship between remainders and fractional parts was often completely unknown.
5) Percent to values often wasn't known. "60% off sales" often meant a bit more than half off. The right intuition, but you need an actual answer for the SAT.
You're right, math is not linear. But if you only understand 50% of what is taught in elementary and junior high school, you're going to understand even less in high school.
- simpleTruth 16y agoyou don't need to know long division... for well... anything On that we can more or less agree. Perhaps we could salvage some of that time and put it to more productive use. And then perhaps after a few years we can go back and look at it again. People think of math as a sort of tree structure where you need this long chain of tools to get to understand each new concept. I am simply suggesting it's closer to a graph where multiple approaches can reach the same concept and reinforce each other. As to the SAT it's mostly a middle school math test. I suspect after a while you build a little crib sheet of the basic concepts that people needed to understand. And yet considering people "studded" this stuff for ~5 hours a week, 36 weeks a year, for ~10 years I suspect the crib sheet was not all that long.
- jaredmck 16y agothe alligator is hungry, he wants to eat the bigger number.
- ern 16y agoAnother useful trick was taught to me in second grade: draw two dots for the bigger number, and one dot for the smaller one. Then join the dots.