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> Something that occurs to me is that most of us have a poor grasp of why we even teach school math I had this experience myself. Math during grade school was
by foobarian 5y ago
> Something that occurs to me is that most of us have a poor grasp of why we even teach school math
I had this experience myself. Math during grade school was delivered kind of like a set of unquestionable facts. Much of which was valuable but I wish it didn't take me until college and some random tangential exercise to realize i didnt really understand how real numbers work.
- dhosek 5y agoSome of it comes down to insufficient grounding in math education preparation. In Illinois at least, K5 teachers are required to take a class that's effectively high school algebra, but at least where I got my credential, the class was taught as if it were just a remedial math class (which, to be honest, it was for more than a few of these would-be K5 teachers), rather than making it clear that the math that they would be teaching would be preparatory for the later class. Similar situations occur with 6-12 mathematics education preparation. This continues well into 200-level and even 300-level college mathematics. Gallian's Contemporary Abstract Algebra spends a lot of time exploring groups of the form a + b√n without explaining why. In general, it seems like math education should step back and read John Dewey and stop teaching mathematics as inert knowledge.