> In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the distributive property consistently, and simply understanding how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number or expression -- I have multiple students messing these up pretty much every week.
Yeah, this is a frustrating one.
I've been catching up my little brother on some math stuff, and I can see him slowly getting better with distributivity, but it's tough.
The frustrating thing is I have a really good sense of what error he's likely to make and why, but I also know that when I try to explain it it's just going to confuse him and he's going to think "your explanation makes sense to me, but my explanation also made sense to me and apparently it was wrong, so how the hell am I supposed to know how to solve this?"
I feel like this is a problem that could be solved with technology, but existing solutions are really terrible at it. I looked at Brilliant, but it does the same "explain complicated mathematical concepts with words that sound logical (and pictures) so the next time the kid tries to understand a complicated thing they'll come up with their own logical-sounding explanation and be completely wrong and get stumped" thing.
EDIT: I think something like an equivalent of Human Resource Machine, except for proof solvers, would be really nice.
Yeah, this is a frustrating one.
I've been catching up my little brother on some math stuff, and I can see him slowly getting better with distributivity, but it's tough.
The frustrating thing is I have a really good sense of what error he's likely to make and why, but I also know that when I try to explain it it's just going to confuse him and he's going to think "your explanation makes sense to me, but my explanation also made sense to me and apparently it was wrong, so how the hell am I supposed to know how to solve this?"
I feel like this is a problem that could be solved with technology, but existing solutions are really terrible at it. I looked at Brilliant, but it does the same "explain complicated mathematical concepts with words that sound logical (and pictures) so the next time the kid tries to understand a complicated thing they'll come up with their own logical-sounding explanation and be completely wrong and get stumped" thing.
EDIT: I think something like an equivalent of Human Resource Machine, except for proof solvers, would be really nice.