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> There's an endless search for an effortless way to learn math. Nonsense. There is a search for more effective ways to teach math. And there most definitely a

by brazzy 6y ago

> There's an endless search for an effortless way to learn math. Nonsense. There is a search for more effective ways to teach math. And there most definitely are differences in effectiveness, so no reason to believe that any given way is optimal. > Just like there is no way to get strong without hard work. There are, however, lots of ways to spend a lot of hard work for little gain.

username90 6y ago
If we were finding better way to teach then kids scores would improve, but they aren't improving.
- harimau777 6y ago
  You may very well be correct; however, I can see some other possibilities: - The scores don't effectively measure learning. - The need to prepare students for tests undermines the ability to try different teaching approaches. - Scores don't change overall but the distribution of scores change. - The distribution of scores don't change but the demographics of the students in a given part of the distribution change. - There are confounding factors such as budget or classroom size.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I don't understand how someone can learn math, yet be unable to solve math problems on a test. In my 16 years of education, I saw a consistent 1:1 correlation with learning the material and doing correspondingly well on the tests. That consistency included myself - when I learned the material, I'd ace the test. When I didn't learn it, I failed the test. There wasn't any magical "learned but didn't test well" going on.
    - hluska 6y ago
      You’re speaking only of yourself and while you should be very happy you don’t suffer from any of a multitude of disorders, it’s highly classist and disrespectful to assume that nobody else else. Consider anxiety disorders. There’s a crystal clear, fully scientifically proven reason that some can know the material but fail to perform on a test. Think more. It helps.
      - monoideism 6y ago
        > highly classist What do "disorders" have to do with class? At best, being from a lower socio economic class could put you at risk for whichever disorders you have in mind, but they aren't synonymous. At least, not in my mind.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        > There’s a crystal clear, fully scientifically proven reason that some can know the material but fail to perform on a test. I don't assume such people don't exist. But I'm not buying there are enough people to significantly alter overall student test results. There'd have to be a couple in every class, and I've never encountered one.
    - bennofs 6y ago
      You're assuming that "math problems" is a well-defined set of problems. But depending on what you want to test/teach, there's also going to be different problems that students will do well on. As an example: do you consider solving 579×46 quickly a "math problem"? I will solve it (relatively) quickly, since I was thought how to solve that exact problem algorithmicaly. But if you hadn't thaught that algorithm (you could argue that nowadays we have calculators for this) then it would probably take you a bit longer to derive some form of this algorithm. But it doesn't necessarily imply that you're bad at math, just that you have not practiced this exact task before. In my experience, doing really well in tests requires more adaption to the tasks of the tests than actual understanding. Most tests are limited on time, and stress does not exactly help you to deal creatively with completely new tasks. Note that I don't want to say that teaching algorithms is bad. It surely helps to do some basic calculation without having to think much about it. I just want to point out that the tests are often testing a specific understanding of math, and different teaching methods often also differ in their goal of what they want students to learn well.
      - WalterBright 6y ago
        Being able to do arithmetic like 579x46 is foundational arithmetic, not some esoteric thing. Furthermore, teaching arithmetic while relying on a calculator is not teaching arithmetic. It's second or third grade material. It's reasonable to expect teachers to teach it and kids to learn it. It's easy to create tests for it.
        harimau777 6y ago
        At least for me, the issue was being able to do arithmetic by hand fast enough to meet the time limit of the test. I don't think that ability necessarily has a great deal in common with understanding mathematics or the ability to do higher level math.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Of course they're not improving. The US education sector is like the US health sector - a device for increasing shareholder value among parasitic corporates, not for providing an effective public service. As a result it provides vanishingly poor outcomes which keep the US below the OECD average, in spite of some of the highest per-student spending in the world. Education is highly politicised, managed by school boards which seem to attract religious kooks and other low-quality authoritarians with eccentric ideas, and which does almost everything it can to discourage good teachers and other suspiciously well-educated and competent individuals from joining or staying in the profession. Widespread poverty in the US population doesn't help. Changing how math is taught won't address the essential dysfunctional broken futility of the system as a whole.
WalterBright 6y ago
> Nonsense. All the attempts to gamify learning math, or teach it by passively watching TV, suggest otherwise. > more effective Sesame Street is probably the most inefficient way to teach arithmetic ever devised. A kid can watch 1000 hours of it, and barely be able to count to 10. We know how to effectively teach math. Present the concepts, follow up with the student working through progressively harder problems. > And there most definitely are differences in effectiveness Since the needle hasn't moved on results, we've likely found the optimal method.
pfortuny 6y ago
Nonsense is such a strong word when experience shows otherwise. Learn playing! Gamify! But people DO NOT LIKE MATHS despite them needing it. I am a professor of the thing and am not ashamed to own it. It is what it is. Like cleanin your room, doing your bed or... shaving!
- jjk166 6y ago
  People love math. Look at youtube channels like 3Blue1Brown - 3 million subscribers, 160 million views, or Numberphile with 3.4 million subscribers and 511 million views. Millions of people of their own free will go out of their way to at least get an introduction to math concepts. Most of this isn't practical knowledge that they need, but rather abstract concepts they learn purely for fun. Think of what fraction of the population who would rather do puzzles instead of what they actually are supposed to be doing at the time. Strip away the tedium of rote arithmetic drills and people can't get enough of real math. Saying people simply don't like math because their eyes glaze over in math class is like saying people don't like stories because they're bored by Great Expectations.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    3.4 million out of several billion :-) Sounds about right!
    - jjk166 6y ago
      Of the 31 Million youtube channels, they are both in the top 5000 most subscribed. 99.9th percentile of popularity ain't too shabby.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Teach math to who? The problem (at least one of the problems) is, kids are different. You see these kids are struggling with the traditional approach. You devise a non-traditional approach to help them. And it actually works! For them... But some kids who would have done fine on the traditional approach now are struggling. Is that a net win? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how many kids are in each group and how bad they're struggling.

by brazzy 6y ago

username90 6y ago

If we were finding better way to teach then kids scores would improve, but they aren't improving.

harimau777 6y ago
You may very well be correct; however, I can see some other possibilities: - The scores don't effectively measure learning. - The need to prepare students for tests undermines the ability to try different teaching approaches. - Scores don't change overall but the distribution of scores change. - The distribution of scores don't change but the demographics of the students in a given part of the distribution change. - There are confounding factors such as budget or classroom size.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I don't understand how someone can learn math, yet be unable to solve math problems on a test. In my 16 years of education, I saw a consistent 1:1 correlation with learning the material and doing correspondingly well on the tests. That consistency included myself - when I learned the material, I'd ace the test. When I didn't learn it, I failed the test. There wasn't any magical "learned but didn't test well" going on.
  - hluska 6y ago
    You’re speaking only of yourself and while you should be very happy you don’t suffer from any of a multitude of disorders, it’s highly classist and disrespectful to assume that nobody else else. Consider anxiety disorders. There’s a crystal clear, fully scientifically proven reason that some can know the material but fail to perform on a test. Think more. It helps.
    - monoideism 6y ago
      > highly classist What do "disorders" have to do with class? At best, being from a lower socio economic class could put you at risk for whichever disorders you have in mind, but they aren't synonymous. At least, not in my mind.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      > There’s a crystal clear, fully scientifically proven reason that some can know the material but fail to perform on a test. I don't assume such people don't exist. But I'm not buying there are enough people to significantly alter overall student test results. There'd have to be a couple in every class, and I've never encountered one.
  - bennofs 6y ago
    You're assuming that "math problems" is a well-defined set of problems. But depending on what you want to test/teach, there's also going to be different problems that students will do well on. As an example: do you consider solving 579×46 quickly a "math problem"? I will solve it (relatively) quickly, since I was thought how to solve that exact problem algorithmicaly. But if you hadn't thaught that algorithm (you could argue that nowadays we have calculators for this) then it would probably take you a bit longer to derive some form of this algorithm. But it doesn't necessarily imply that you're bad at math, just that you have not practiced this exact task before. In my experience, doing really well in tests requires more adaption to the tasks of the tests than actual understanding. Most tests are limited on time, and stress does not exactly help you to deal creatively with completely new tasks. Note that I don't want to say that teaching algorithms is bad. It surely helps to do some basic calculation without having to think much about it. I just want to point out that the tests are often testing a specific understanding of math, and different teaching methods often also differ in their goal of what they want students to learn well.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      Being able to do arithmetic like 579x46 is foundational arithmetic, not some esoteric thing. Furthermore, teaching arithmetic while relying on a calculator is not teaching arithmetic. It's second or third grade material. It's reasonable to expect teachers to teach it and kids to learn it. It's easy to create tests for it.
      - harimau777 6y ago
        At least for me, the issue was being able to do arithmetic by hand fast enough to meet the time limit of the test. I don't think that ability necessarily has a great deal in common with understanding mathematics or the ability to do higher level math.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Of course they're not improving. The US education sector is like the US health sector - a device for increasing shareholder value among parasitic corporates, not for providing an effective public service. As a result it provides vanishingly poor outcomes which keep the US below the OECD average, in spite of some of the highest per-student spending in the world. Education is highly politicised, managed by school boards which seem to attract religious kooks and other low-quality authoritarians with eccentric ideas, and which does almost everything it can to discourage good teachers and other suspiciously well-educated and competent individuals from joining or staying in the profession. Widespread poverty in the US population doesn't help. Changing how math is taught won't address the essential dysfunctional broken futility of the system as a whole.

WalterBright 6y ago

> Nonsense. All the attempts to gamify learning math, or teach it by passively watching TV, suggest otherwise. > more effective Sesame Street is probably the most inefficient way to teach arithmetic ever devised. A kid can watch 1000 hours of it, and barely be able to count to 10. We know how to effectively teach math. Present the concepts, follow up with the student working through progressively harder problems. > And there most definitely are differences in effectiveness Since the needle hasn't moved on results, we've likely found the optimal method.

pfortuny 6y ago

Nonsense is such a strong word when experience shows otherwise. Learn playing! Gamify! But people DO NOT LIKE MATHS despite them needing it. I am a professor of the thing and am not ashamed to own it. It is what it is. Like cleanin your room, doing your bed or... shaving!

jjk166 6y ago
People love math. Look at youtube channels like 3Blue1Brown - 3 million subscribers, 160 million views, or Numberphile with 3.4 million subscribers and 511 million views. Millions of people of their own free will go out of their way to at least get an introduction to math concepts. Most of this isn't practical knowledge that they need, but rather abstract concepts they learn purely for fun. Think of what fraction of the population who would rather do puzzles instead of what they actually are supposed to be doing at the time. Strip away the tedium of rote arithmetic drills and people can't get enough of real math. Saying people simply don't like math because their eyes glaze over in math class is like saying people don't like stories because they're bored by Great Expectations.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  3.4 million out of several billion :-) Sounds about right!
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Of the 31 Million youtube channels, they are both in the top 5000 most subscribed. 99.9th percentile of popularity ain't too shabby.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

Teach math to who? The problem (at least one of the problems) is, kids are different. You see these kids are struggling with the traditional approach. You devise a non-traditional approach to help them. And it actually works! For them... But some kids who would have done fine on the traditional approach now are struggling. Is that a net win? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how many kids are in each group and how bad they're struggling.