
Why Do Americans Stink at Math? - platz
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html
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ColinWright
You may be interested in the discussion from the first time this was
submitted:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8076683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8076683)

More recent submissions provoked no significant discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8084169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8084169)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8094705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8094705)

~~~
platz
Ahh, didn't see those, thanks!

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ScottBurson
My wife's sister Susan taught fourth grade for a year at a charter school in
Fremont. On the one hand: she worked very hard, and spent some of her own
salary on teaching materials, as, is evidently standard practice in our Prop.
13-devastated California schools. Also, in fairness, all her past experience
had been teaching first grade.

On the other hand: she was completely incompetent to teach fourth grade math.
The prescribed subject matter was adding and subtracting fractions, and she
had to ask me to remind her how to do it. But it quickly became clear that she
had no idea how to communicate the knowledge to her students. All she knew how
to do was to assign them dozens of homework problems and spend many hours
laboriously grading them -- all completely wasted effort because, as I saw,
the students were getting many problems wrong, and they weren't improving over
time. This went on for weeks. It was worse than wasted effort, because all she
could possibly have succeeded in doing was convincing the kids that they hated
math and sucked at it. Thus one generation fails the next; and on it goes.

I tried to tell her that she needed to assign many fewer problems. I think
that if a student can successfully work five of these problems, showing their
work, that's enough to demonstrate mastery. And if they get any of them wrong,
they _don 't get it_ and they need to be shown how to do it, not just
mechanically but _with visualization aids_ so they understand the _concept_ ,
not just the mechanics. The whole thing should take about half an hour, once
they understand multiplication and division. Not weeks!!

From the article:

 _One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in
the early 1980s, when the A &W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to
rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W
burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers
preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and
radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the
great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The
Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we
failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were
being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same
amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat
at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray._

Clearly, people making this error don't know what a fraction _means_ at all. I
was stunned when I first read this, but given that my sister-in-law's teaching
methods are probably not that unusual, maybe I shouldn't have been so
surprised.

~~~
platz
Thanks for the story - seems to further corroborate the findings in the
article

