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I think there are smarter drills to do. In another comment I lauded the way I was taught math, and how it built intuition, but it certainly had lots of drills t
by ravi-delia 4y ago
I think there are smarter drills to do. In another comment I lauded the way I was taught math, and how it built intuition, but it certainly had lots of drills too. I think what worked was that we were taught more than one way to do each thing, usually one more theory-heavy and another more technique-heavy, and we had lots of drills focused just on the primitive operations. There was lots of focus on mental math, which is just super handy for understanding more complicated problems since you don't even have to think about the simpler steps. While they did go over how fractions were just division in disguise (with pictures, which I found very helpful), knowing how to find a least common denominator is much faster than improvising every time, so even if I hated it I'm glad we did lots of drilling with those too.
- mlyle 4y agoA lot of what you describe has become the standard way to teach elementary math-- from the "new math" onwards to Common Core pushing aspects of looking at problems the same way Our school does the much-lauded Singapore Math in elementary, which definitely tries to build intuition and looks at many approaches, and supplements with drills. And I teach a competitive math class which definitely is all about finding different ways around problems and comparing and contrasting.
- ravi-delia 4y agoI'm thrilled to hear it's popular! In my hometown it was killed by doubters, but perhaps with expanding evidence they'll reconsider. I think perhaps it was lumped in with disastrous testing efforts, but the math at least was pretty great.
- mlyle 4y ago:D I'm not sure it's popular: it's controversial with parents, in general. But I think it's a good thing, overall. I do think most programs implementing it end up taking out a little too much rote and algorithms.