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This is a bit meta, but the "fractions" thing cracks me up. There should be a Godwin's law for it... The probability of a story about public education mentionin

by beefman 13y ago

This is a bit meta, but the "fractions" thing cracks me up. There should be a Godwin's law for it... The probability of a story about public education mentioning "fractions" approaches 1. Why are fractions a thing? Sure, the rationals are distinct from the integers and reals, but... Does everyone except me have PTSD from learning fractions or something? Why are they more important than any other math topic, subject, or aspect of education? By golly, if we could just figure out how to teach fractions, we'd have a bona fide education system. I think I started noticing it after this Onion piece (NSFW) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btw1eh4mitQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btw1eh4mitQ

tokenadult 13y ago
Here is an actual question for schoolteachers from a National Science Foundation study of elementary mathematics instruction in the United States. In Liping Ma's book (mentioned in my comment above, with links to two reviews), the author took the same NSF sample survey questions to teachers in China and compared how Chinese teachers answered the questions. Here is a teaching question for any reader of Hacker News who has ever had occasion to teach mathematics or explain mathematics to a friend or colleague: "Scenario 3: Division by Fractions "People seem to have different approaches to solving problems involving division with fractions. How do you solve a problem like this one? 1¾ ÷ ½ "Imagine that you are teaching division with fractions. To make this meaningful for kids, something that many teachers try to do is relate mathematics to other things. Sometimes they try to come up with real-world situations or story problems to show the application of some particular piece of content. What would you say would be a good story or model for 1¾ ÷ ½ ? " This problem, providing an illustration for what it means to divide one rational number by another, proves to be extremely hard for United States teaches, but quite easy for teachers in China. What story problem would you devise to embed this calculation into a context understandable to children?

by beefman 13y ago

tokenadult 13y ago

Here is an actual question for schoolteachers from a National Science Foundation study of elementary mathematics instruction in the United States. In Liping Ma's book (mentioned in my comment above, with links to two reviews), the author took the same NSF sample survey questions to teachers in China and compared how Chinese teachers answered the questions. Here is a teaching question for any reader of Hacker News who has ever had occasion to teach mathematics or explain mathematics to a friend or colleague: "Scenario 3: Division by Fractions "People seem to have different approaches to solving problems involving division with fractions. How do you solve a problem like this one? 1¾ ÷ ½ "Imagine that you are teaching division with fractions. To make this meaningful for kids, something that many teachers try to do is relate mathematics to other things. Sometimes they try to come up with real-world situations or story problems to show the application of some particular piece of content. What would you say would be a good story or model for 1¾ ÷ ½ ? " This problem, providing an illustration for what it means to divide one rational number by another, proves to be extremely hard for United States teaches, but quite easy for teachers in China. What story problem would you devise to embed this calculation into a context understandable to children?