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I was shocked listening this morning that only 58 seconds of every 5 hour preschool day are spent on math. In my experience, elementary school teachers tend to

I was shocked listening this morning that only 58 seconds of every 5 hour preschool day are spent on math. In my experience, elementary school teachers tend to be soft-skills people who primarily just love working with young children. Many didn't enjoy math, felt they were bad at it, and would prefer to teach children reading and writing. And because elementary schools have one teacher guide the same group of children through all four core subjects instead of specializing in one subject (like middle or high school teachers) the teacher's less-preferenced subjects get less time. Source: former (public) high school science teacher

clarkmoody 12y ago
I am interested to hear if high-school/college style teaching has been tried at the elementary level. And what were the outcomes? Specifically, have schools tried to partition students into courses based on achievement level, regardless of age? There would be the Math 1 course that might have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders in it, and Math 2 might have brighter 1st graders, etc.
- jkimmel 12y ago
  I haven't heard of this being attempted, though I would surprised to find that it hasn't. However, one reason it might be avoided is due to the potential negative effects tracking [1] strategies may have on some students. In my public school district, any form of tracking at the elementary level was difficult to implement due to pushback from parents, even in situations where the educators felt it was beneficial. 1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28education%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28education%29
- eximius 12y ago
  I imagine that anywhere it is suggested it would be shot down by logistical concerns as well as sociological concerns of mixing age groups. You need a relatively common level of maturity, etc.
- 21echoes 12y ago
  Coming from Delaware, most every school, public and private, that I know of partitions students into math courses based on achievement level. They typically don't let students go "out of grade" by more than a year, but that's a sizable amount in high school (e.g., some juniors learning the same material as some freshman). I didn't know there were places that didn't do it that way-- do your local schools not have advanced math & regular math tracks for their students?
  - slayed0 12y ago
    Most schools do it at the high school and maybe jr. high level but I have never heard of this happening at the elementary level. We had separate math "groups" in elementary school but this was still within the same classroom and the more advanced group simply learned more about the concepts we were covering. (Born, raised, and educated in California)
    - 21echoes 12y ago
      you're totally right -- I was talking about the jr. high and high school levels. Occasionally you'll see exceptions and some kids will be allowed up a grade or two in elementary, but it's not embedded in the process the way it is in jr. high and high school.
- analog31 12y ago
  The elementary school that my kids attended had a couple of approaches. In higher grades, teachers paired up, and swapped classrooms so the stronger math teacher taught math to both classes. They also had "math specialists" who could float from one classroom to another, along with other kinds of special teachers and aides of various stripes. A decent fraction of the kids learned math at home, making it hard to assess how well the school was actually doing.
- pmalynin 12y ago
  Well, yes and no. I can only speak from my experience of doing grades 1 through 7 in a Ukrainian school and then 8-12 in Canada. The year I went into school I was placed into the "Sapling" (Rostok) programme, which was a very accelerated "experimental" programme. I remember that in Grade 2 we were learning Venn Diagrams and basic set notation. And so on. By Grade 4 we were allegedly 2-3 years ahead of the "regular" system. Now when I got to Canada in Grade 8 I honestly did not know what to do with myself, the level of math I was exposed simply eclipsed what was being taught (Integer beads, the fuck?) and this has been my general experience of the school system up until Grade 12 where we started doing Calculus (which in "Sapling" was supposed to be done in Gr. 9-10). The problem, I think, is not that kids can't learn (in fact the amount neuroplasticity in young children is simply off the charts, to the point where 6-7 year olds who can play really good violin are not something special), but is that the educational system simply does want to go there, to increase the levels of math taught in schools.
  - cmollis 12y ago
    I believe this is also called 'business as usual'... but you actually put it much better.
colomon 12y ago
58 seconds of every _preschool_ day. The stat has nothing to do with elementary school teachers.
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  You are correct, but it's still astounding. (I edited the parent comment, thanks!) Is it because many people find it more intellectually gratifying to watch children develop literacy than numeracy? (i.e. Learning to talk makes a child into someone you can interact with and share experience, while learning to count has little immediate impact on how a child can interact with a parent or teacher)
  - ObviousScience 12y ago
    There's lots of math you can teach that isn't basic numbers though! Symmetries, commutativity, associativity, transitivity, basic algebra/equation solving, some geometry, etc. Teaching these ideas gives children a language to describe the world they're in and make sense of the ideas and concepts that bombard them - they're perhaps even more useful than numbers in this regard. The problem is that most elementary teachers aren't up to explaining these more advanced math concepts (lots of them have trouble with advanced middle school level math), and instead focus on just basic arithmetic. This does a huge disservice to our children, because kids soak these topics up when well explained, and seem to really enjoy the learning (which is often hands on). I spent a fair bit of time in university (where I studied math) volunteering along with a professor to teach lectures to young children (1st-4th grade in the US) about math. I honestly wish we could just accept that mathematics is as much of a specialized language/topic as foreign languages, and get specialist teachers starting early on.
    - eru 12y ago
      > There's lots of math you can teach that isn't basic numbers though! > Symmetries, commutativity, associativity, transitivity, basic algebra/equation solving, some geometry, etc. And games. Even rock, scissors, paper (plus variants).
userbinator 12y ago
I'd like to know what the other 17942 seconds are being spent on, if not maths.
- infinite8s 12y ago
  In general, free play and basic obedience training.
tokenadult 12y ago
Another Hacker News participant recently kindly shared in a comment a 2007 report by Educational Testing Service (ETS) titled "Teacher Quality in a Changing Policy Landscape: Improvements in the Teaching Pool".[1] The report showed that even though changes in teacher license requirements are boosting selection of higher-SAT-score rather than lower-SAT-score aspiring teachers, elementary teachers are drawn from college students who scored significantly lower than most college graduates on the SAT math section (Figure 21 in the report). The mean score of a recent prospective elementary school teacher in the United States when that teacher took the SAT for college entrance was barely above 500 on the math section. Alas, in general, American schools are underperforming in teaching the most advantaged members of American society,[2] especially in mathematics,[3] while not doing well by the least advantaged young people in American society either.[4] The current efforts in preschools reported in the interesting article submitted here should be followed up by further reform of elementary school mathematics instruction. The book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics by Liping Ma[5] is especially informative about what to do to help all learners in the United States learn mathematics better in early schooling. [1] http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report.pdf http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report... [2] http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/ http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/ http://educationnext.org/young-gifted-and-neglected/ http://educationnext.org/young-gifted-and-neglected/ [3] http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ [4] http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf [5] https://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/01-askey_review_of_liping_ma.pdf https://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attach... http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/opinion/q-a-with-liping-ma.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/opinion/q-a-with-liping-ma... http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Understanding/dp/0415873843 http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
pnathan 12y ago
> elementary school teachers tend to be soft-skills people who primarily just love working with young children. Your description summarizes my experience meeting elementary education majors in college quite well. They weren't the hardcore intellectual types, but they really like working with kids. So they optimized for a route that made sense for them. Unfortunately for the children, they won't get exposed to the intellectual areas because the teachers really weren't into that.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
We should probably start to separate the teaching away from the supervising. Have some high quality instructional videos to demo to students along with some learning software. Use the instructors mainly to monitor and supervise students.
rdtsc 12y ago
I guess at that age (preschool, first grade), math doesn't have to be math to be math. It can be jumping up and down and counting as article says. I can be counting stairs going up and down, building a tower out of sliced cucumbers during lunch. I feel an intuition about quantities and being familiar with numbers is a good foundation. At least that is what I am trying with my 3 year old.
- nashashmi 12y ago
  I would second this. I just thought my 5 year old cousin grids and locations on a grid simply because I wanted him to play battleship. Next up: difference in distance between one battleship to another; difference in distance across two axis; difference in x and y being called slope. Then the possibilities are endless.
  - GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
    I learned grids and coordinates at school (UK) when I was 5.
ludamad 12y ago
Fun story, I literally cried in class when my elementary teacher insistently spent a whole lesson teaching BEDMAS wrong.
Patrick_Devine 12y ago
I agree with you that the way we teach school is completely ridiculous, but 58 seconds for _preschool_ on math is probably fine. Ages 3-5 are really about learning how to socialize, play and interact with the world, and it isn't until about age 6-7 when many kids even develop an aptitude for mathematics. Scandinavian countries use a concept called "Readiness to Learn" and don't teach reading or mathematics until age 7. Your children will likely be much better off playing and being kids in pre-school and learning things like how to sit still as well as fine motor control. That said, yes, public schooling is insane. We pile children into classrooms and then expect them to all learn the same subjects at the same rate. We grade them based on arbitrary deadlines and we force them to learn more complex topics without making sure that they have mastered basic concepts. How someone can get an 'A' and not know 10% of subject matter is beyond me. Oh, and in the US we force all children into the schizophrenic "No Child Left Behind" program which encourages teachers to only teach to tests administered at arbitrary times. In any kind of reasonable system, children would be able to learn at their own pace, and wouldn't advance to more difficult subject matter until they had achieved 100% mastery. Montessori teaching has elements of this, but I think it will really take new tools like Khan Academy and "flipping the classroom" to make it practicable.
- musername 12y ago
  i heared age four as the beginning to mathematical understanding. sure socialization is important, but why would that precludes the abillity to calculation, maybe without the formal approach.
  - Patrick_Devine 12y ago
    Nothing precludes you teaching your children about mathematics. That's something you can easily do at home for 5-10 minutes every day or two. With my four year old I do this, and also practice things like the alphabet, but it's not something I expect her preschool to do. Preschool should be about group play, socialization and getting ready for kindergarden. It shouldn't be about academics.

clarkmoody 12y ago

I am interested to hear if high-school/college style teaching has been tried at the elementary level. And what were the outcomes? Specifically, have schools tried to partition students into courses based on achievement level, regardless of age? There would be the Math 1 course that might have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders in it, and Math 2 might have brighter 1st graders, etc.

jkimmel 12y ago
I haven't heard of this being attempted, though I would surprised to find that it hasn't. However, one reason it might be avoided is due to the potential negative effects tracking [1] strategies may have on some students. In my public school district, any form of tracking at the elementary level was difficult to implement due to pushback from parents, even in situations where the educators felt it was beneficial. 1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28education%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_%28education%29
eximius 12y ago
I imagine that anywhere it is suggested it would be shot down by logistical concerns as well as sociological concerns of mixing age groups. You need a relatively common level of maturity, etc.
21echoes 12y ago
Coming from Delaware, most every school, public and private, that I know of partitions students into math courses based on achievement level. They typically don't let students go "out of grade" by more than a year, but that's a sizable amount in high school (e.g., some juniors learning the same material as some freshman). I didn't know there were places that didn't do it that way-- do your local schools not have advanced math & regular math tracks for their students?
- slayed0 12y ago
  Most schools do it at the high school and maybe jr. high level but I have never heard of this happening at the elementary level. We had separate math "groups" in elementary school but this was still within the same classroom and the more advanced group simply learned more about the concepts we were covering. (Born, raised, and educated in California)
  - 21echoes 12y ago
    you're totally right -- I was talking about the jr. high and high school levels. Occasionally you'll see exceptions and some kids will be allowed up a grade or two in elementary, but it's not embedded in the process the way it is in jr. high and high school.
analog31 12y ago
The elementary school that my kids attended had a couple of approaches. In higher grades, teachers paired up, and swapped classrooms so the stronger math teacher taught math to both classes. They also had "math specialists" who could float from one classroom to another, along with other kinds of special teachers and aides of various stripes. A decent fraction of the kids learned math at home, making it hard to assess how well the school was actually doing.
pmalynin 12y ago
Well, yes and no. I can only speak from my experience of doing grades 1 through 7 in a Ukrainian school and then 8-12 in Canada. The year I went into school I was placed into the "Sapling" (Rostok) programme, which was a very accelerated "experimental" programme. I remember that in Grade 2 we were learning Venn Diagrams and basic set notation. And so on. By Grade 4 we were allegedly 2-3 years ahead of the "regular" system. Now when I got to Canada in Grade 8 I honestly did not know what to do with myself, the level of math I was exposed simply eclipsed what was being taught (Integer beads, the fuck?) and this has been my general experience of the school system up until Grade 12 where we started doing Calculus (which in "Sapling" was supposed to be done in Gr. 9-10). The problem, I think, is not that kids can't learn (in fact the amount neuroplasticity in young children is simply off the charts, to the point where 6-7 year olds who can play really good violin are not something special), but is that the educational system simply does want to go there, to increase the levels of math taught in schools.
- cmollis 12y ago
  I believe this is also called 'business as usual'... but you actually put it much better.

colomon 12y ago

58 seconds of every _preschool_ day. The stat has nothing to do with elementary school teachers.

eastbayjake 12y ago
You are correct, but it's still astounding. (I edited the parent comment, thanks!) Is it because many people find it more intellectually gratifying to watch children develop literacy than numeracy? (i.e. Learning to talk makes a child into someone you can interact with and share experience, while learning to count has little immediate impact on how a child can interact with a parent or teacher)
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  There's lots of math you can teach that isn't basic numbers though! Symmetries, commutativity, associativity, transitivity, basic algebra/equation solving, some geometry, etc. Teaching these ideas gives children a language to describe the world they're in and make sense of the ideas and concepts that bombard them - they're perhaps even more useful than numbers in this regard. The problem is that most elementary teachers aren't up to explaining these more advanced math concepts (lots of them have trouble with advanced middle school level math), and instead focus on just basic arithmetic. This does a huge disservice to our children, because kids soak these topics up when well explained, and seem to really enjoy the learning (which is often hands on). I spent a fair bit of time in university (where I studied math) volunteering along with a professor to teach lectures to young children (1st-4th grade in the US) about math. I honestly wish we could just accept that mathematics is as much of a specialized language/topic as foreign languages, and get specialist teachers starting early on.
  - eru 12y ago
    > There's lots of math you can teach that isn't basic numbers though! > Symmetries, commutativity, associativity, transitivity, basic algebra/equation solving, some geometry, etc. And games. Even rock, scissors, paper (plus variants).

userbinator 12y ago

I'd like to know what the other 17942 seconds are being spent on, if not maths.

infinite8s 12y ago
In general, free play and basic obedience training.

tokenadult 12y ago

Another Hacker News participant recently kindly shared in a comment a 2007 report by Educational Testing Service (ETS) titled "Teacher Quality in a Changing Policy Landscape: Improvements in the Teaching Pool".[1] The report showed that even though changes in teacher license requirements are boosting selection of higher-SAT-score rather than lower-SAT-score aspiring teachers, elementary teachers are drawn from college students who scored significantly lower than most college graduates on the SAT math section (Figure 21 in the report). The mean score of a recent prospective elementary school teacher in the United States when that teacher took the SAT for college entrance was barely above 500 on the math section. Alas, in general, American schools are underperforming in teaching the most advantaged members of American society,[2] especially in mathematics,[3] while not doing well by the least advantaged young people in American society either.[4] The current efforts in preschools reported in the interesting article submitted here should be followed up by further reform of elementary school mathematics instruction. The book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics by Liping Ma[5] is especially informative about what to do to help all learners in the United States learn mathematics better in early schooling. [1] http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report.pdf http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report... [2] http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/ http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/ http://educationnext.org/young-gifted-and-neglected/ http://educationnext.org/young-gifted-and-neglected/ [3] http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/ [4] http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf [5] https://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/01-askey_review_of_liping_ma.pdf https://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attach... http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/opinion/q-a-with-liping-ma.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/opinion/q-a-with-liping-ma... http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Understanding/dp/0415873843 http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

pnathan 12y ago

> elementary school teachers tend to be soft-skills people who primarily just love working with young children. Your description summarizes my experience meeting elementary education majors in college quite well. They weren't the hardcore intellectual types, but they really like working with kids. So they optimized for a route that made sense for them. Unfortunately for the children, they won't get exposed to the intellectual areas because the teachers really weren't into that.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago

We should probably start to separate the teaching away from the supervising. Have some high quality instructional videos to demo to students along with some learning software. Use the instructors mainly to monitor and supervise students.

rdtsc 12y ago

I guess at that age (preschool, first grade), math doesn't have to be math to be math. It can be jumping up and down and counting as article says. I can be counting stairs going up and down, building a tower out of sliced cucumbers during lunch. I feel an intuition about quantities and being familiar with numbers is a good foundation. At least that is what I am trying with my 3 year old.

nashashmi 12y ago
I would second this. I just thought my 5 year old cousin grids and locations on a grid simply because I wanted him to play battleship. Next up: difference in distance between one battleship to another; difference in distance across two axis; difference in x and y being called slope. Then the possibilities are endless.
- GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
  I learned grids and coordinates at school (UK) when I was 5.

ludamad 12y ago

Fun story, I literally cried in class when my elementary teacher insistently spent a whole lesson teaching BEDMAS wrong.

Patrick_Devine 12y ago

I agree with you that the way we teach school is completely ridiculous, but 58 seconds for _preschool_ on math is probably fine. Ages 3-5 are really about learning how to socialize, play and interact with the world, and it isn't until about age 6-7 when many kids even develop an aptitude for mathematics. Scandinavian countries use a concept called "Readiness to Learn" and don't teach reading or mathematics until age 7. Your children will likely be much better off playing and being kids in pre-school and learning things like how to sit still as well as fine motor control. That said, yes, public schooling is insane. We pile children into classrooms and then expect them to all learn the same subjects at the same rate. We grade them based on arbitrary deadlines and we force them to learn more complex topics without making sure that they have mastered basic concepts. How someone can get an 'A' and not know 10% of subject matter is beyond me. Oh, and in the US we force all children into the schizophrenic "No Child Left Behind" program which encourages teachers to only teach to tests administered at arbitrary times. In any kind of reasonable system, children would be able to learn at their own pace, and wouldn't advance to more difficult subject matter until they had achieved 100% mastery. Montessori teaching has elements of this, but I think it will really take new tools like Khan Academy and "flipping the classroom" to make it practicable.

musername 12y ago
i heared age four as the beginning to mathematical understanding. sure socialization is important, but why would that precludes the abillity to calculation, maybe without the formal approach.
- Patrick_Devine 12y ago
  Nothing precludes you teaching your children about mathematics. That's something you can easily do at home for 5-10 minutes every day or two. With my four year old I do this, and also practice things like the alphabet, but it's not something I expect her preschool to do. Preschool should be about group play, socialization and getting ready for kindergarden. It shouldn't be about academics.