> where the concept is relatively easy to understand (two points make a line, we only have one point, so take the limit) although the implementation is complex (requires either understanding algebra or knowing lots of rules.)
The pedagogy of Mathematics education is fundamentally broken and we've lost generations of math users because of it.
Approaching it from this sense "two points make a line, we only have one point, so take the limit" is the method today and with all respect, it's been a terrible terrible failure...even if it is "correct".
A few kids will grok it and turn into computer scientists or physicists or mathematicians of some sort, and the other 98% will take the bare minimum to get their high school education, and if they go on to college see which degree programs require math and which don't and select the B.A. degree that doesn't.
Anecdotal, but I don't know a single person who enjoyed their K-12 math education. I know lots of people who enjoy math, and found that joy in college or later, but found the educational experience of K-12 so abysmal and torturous that they completely swore off even pursuing fields with heavy Math components. There are lots of artists, musicians, writers and historians who would probably be great Mathematicians, Physicists and Scientists were it not for the piss poor job we do indoctrinating kids into math.
It's not just that students fail to learn mathematics, it's that the pedagogical experience is so negative that they swear off ever even trying. And IMHO, a very big part of that is the (to the student) endlessly pointless jargon filled inapplicable overly rigorous and formal mess that is Math education today.
I've sat in the audience on some very heated round tables about promoting STEM education in my region and I've come away convinced that getting more people into STEM is critical to long-term economic success, but students are not only not drawn into STEM, they're actively driven away from it by the pedagogical approach of what amounts to a single class every year. Students love science classes and science labs, they love shop class and learning engineering, they love computers and everything else to do with STEM except for the K-12 Mathematics education. And that loses them, it simply drives them away from all of these great (and often lucrative) fields.
More importantly, I think fields which are not traditionally Math focused, could benefit greatly from a better general Math education. Read a social sciences academic paper and see what I mean for a quick example.
> If you try to teach a little kid the power rule right off the bat, they will both be turned off of math (because it's just pushing x around for no clear reason) and have learned absolutely nothing of the important bits of calculus.
I want to agree particularly with this, "it's just pushing x around for no clear reason". The fundamental problem with learning Mathematics in K-12 is applicability. Beyond arithmetic, students have almost zero examples of why they should bother learning anything else. Most of the population gets by just fine without anything more complex than arithmetic and figuring out percentages (and even then that's a stretch).
When students go to their parents to seek guidance, their parents also don't have any idea why they have to learn all this stuff. They certainly don't need it in their day jobs and can't provide a hint as to why it's important other than the student needs to study it for the grades.
And to be honest, even if their parents do use Mathematics in their work and can provide examples, it's likely that the student's ability to relate to that work is very limited. The reinforcement that all this time spent learning Math is pointless is much stronger than the reinforcement that it's important or useful. Getting a kid to crank through 20 or 30 algebra problems is much harder than say, a 5 paragraph essay for English class because the entire time they're doing this they're saying to themselves "why am I doing this? Math is useless! At least learning to write a little has some kind of use!"
But children will play "pointless" games for hours and hours and hours - and not even ones they're especially having fun with, just ones that hold their interest (if you've ever watched a 9 year old vent frustration at their Xbox you'll know what I mean). If we can turn Mathematics education into a kind of "game", then fill in the details and formal bits as they age, they'll at least be able to relate to it even if they don't understand the application or relevancy.
And the truth is, once you get to Calculus and get it, it's actually pretty fun and pretty easy. That's a high enough discipline for most STEM jobs and I firmly believe that every K-12 student should be able to do what we call "college level" Calculus by the 10th grade. So why not try to capture the things that make Mathematics at that level fun and easy, and I think that's the symbolic manipulation, even if it is hard to establish relevancy, and get them used to doing it from a very early age. Kids can move blocks around and stack them before they can walk, why can't the blocks be bits of equations? And why can't moving the blocks have little game-like rules they can learn?
>Read a social sciences academic paper and see what I mean for a quick example.
I have actually done some graduate-level work in sociology and history, and the papers and books I read were mostly examples of very good statistical work and well-thought-out process analysis. You can put your STEM-master-race badge away.
>Beyond arithmetic, students have almost zero examples of why they should bother learning anything else.
When I say "for no reason," I don't mean "for no day-to-day practical reason." Playing with abstract concepts is and should be its own reward; that was the whole point of TFA. Mechanically memorizing how to take the derivatives of polynomials is neither a fun abstract concept nor a boring-but-necessary practical skill.
>If we can turn Mathematics education into a kind of "game", then fill in the details and formal bits as they age, they'll at least be able to relate to it even if they don't understand the application or relevancy.
"Gamification" as a cynical ploy to get kids to sit still long enough memorize their times tables may or may not work. But even if it does, it's only gotten them to play the game long enough to pass them to the next level; it has deliberately shifted their interest away from the joy of learning for its own sake. That is not what the article is about, and it's not helpful in the long run.
>Approaching it from this sense "two points make a line, we only have one point, so take the limit" is the method today and with all respect, it's been a terrible terrible failure...even if it is "correct".
No... no, it isn't. The approach today, for the majority of students, is to learn the bare basics so that you can plug them into an equation and find out what the marginal cost of widgets will be next year given a certain set of equations. And in any case, it comes so late that kids have been taught that "math" is something that actually is boring and useless.
> Playing with abstract concepts is and should be its own reward
I'm sorry, but you're just simply wrong on all points. Promoting the status quo in math education, as you are doing, has been, is, and will continue to be a failure that drives kids away from learning. There are now decades of evidence of the failures of k-12 education to address this need and I find it unbelievable that you haven't gotten the picture yet.
I'm not saying that what I'm proposing is correct, but continuing the very poor pedagogical approach that you support is not going to solve the educational failures that we're experiencing today. What we need are fundamentally new approaches to Math education. You are not providing any insight into what those approaches should be.
I'm sorry, but in a discussion to fix and change what is obviously utterly broken in k-12 maths education, suggesting to just continue the course is not a helpful contribution and is simply part of perpetuating the problem.
This has been recognized for so long, that it has finally percolated out of educational establishment, which has failed to address the problem with undereducated and unqualified teachers, student motivation, repeated failures in curriculum development (Common Core is simply the latest joke of a curriculum), and has reached levels as high as the White House for targeting. You have to know that the current approaches are failing if the President has to get involved.
"Schools often lack teachers who know how to teach science and mathematics effectively, and who know and love their subject well enough to inspire their students. Teachers lack adequate support, including appropriate professional development as well as interesting and intriguing curricula."
"As a result, too many American students conclude early in their education that STEM subjects are boring, too difficult, or unwelcoming, leaving them ill-prepared to meet the challenges that will face their generation, their country, and the world."
"Put together, this body of evidence suggests that grade-school children do not think as simplistically about STEM subjects as conventional curricula assume. They are capable of grasping both concrete examples and abstract concepts at remarkably early ages. Conventional approaches to teaching science and math have sometimes been shaped by misconceptions about what children cannot learn rather than focusing
on students’ innate curiosity, reasoning skills, and intimate observations of the natural world."
"The first principle of How People Learn emphasizes both the need to build on existing knowledge and the need to engage students' preconceptions -- particularly when they interfere with learning. In mathematics, certain preconceptions that are often fostered early on in school settings are in fact counterproductive. Students who believe them can easily conclude that the study of mathematics is 'not for them' and should be avoided if at all possible."
I differ from this report in that they continue to promote a bottom-up approach to maths education. I think math should be taught from a top-down approach, like nearly every other discipline. You don't learn to bake a cake by first spending 10 years learning about chemistry, agriculture, nutrition, animal husbandry, distillation etc. You say "I want to bake a cake" and you start with a simple cake recipe. Then the next time you say "I want to bake a different cake" and you use a more complicated recipe. And so on and so forth until you don't need a recipe and are putting together your own cakes from scratch.
The "cake" I'm proposing is calculus...and I believe, from experience teaching basic calculus to kids under 10, that this is realizable and beneficial.
The pedagogy of Mathematics education is fundamentally broken and we've lost generations of math users because of it.
Approaching it from this sense "two points make a line, we only have one point, so take the limit" is the method today and with all respect, it's been a terrible terrible failure...even if it is "correct".
A few kids will grok it and turn into computer scientists or physicists or mathematicians of some sort, and the other 98% will take the bare minimum to get their high school education, and if they go on to college see which degree programs require math and which don't and select the B.A. degree that doesn't.
Anecdotal, but I don't know a single person who enjoyed their K-12 math education. I know lots of people who enjoy math, and found that joy in college or later, but found the educational experience of K-12 so abysmal and torturous that they completely swore off even pursuing fields with heavy Math components. There are lots of artists, musicians, writers and historians who would probably be great Mathematicians, Physicists and Scientists were it not for the piss poor job we do indoctrinating kids into math.
It's not just that students fail to learn mathematics, it's that the pedagogical experience is so negative that they swear off ever even trying. And IMHO, a very big part of that is the (to the student) endlessly pointless jargon filled inapplicable overly rigorous and formal mess that is Math education today.
I've sat in the audience on some very heated round tables about promoting STEM education in my region and I've come away convinced that getting more people into STEM is critical to long-term economic success, but students are not only not drawn into STEM, they're actively driven away from it by the pedagogical approach of what amounts to a single class every year. Students love science classes and science labs, they love shop class and learning engineering, they love computers and everything else to do with STEM except for the K-12 Mathematics education. And that loses them, it simply drives them away from all of these great (and often lucrative) fields.
More importantly, I think fields which are not traditionally Math focused, could benefit greatly from a better general Math education. Read a social sciences academic paper and see what I mean for a quick example.
> If you try to teach a little kid the power rule right off the bat, they will both be turned off of math (because it's just pushing x around for no clear reason) and have learned absolutely nothing of the important bits of calculus.
I want to agree particularly with this, "it's just pushing x around for no clear reason". The fundamental problem with learning Mathematics in K-12 is applicability. Beyond arithmetic, students have almost zero examples of why they should bother learning anything else. Most of the population gets by just fine without anything more complex than arithmetic and figuring out percentages (and even then that's a stretch).
When students go to their parents to seek guidance, their parents also don't have any idea why they have to learn all this stuff. They certainly don't need it in their day jobs and can't provide a hint as to why it's important other than the student needs to study it for the grades.
And to be honest, even if their parents do use Mathematics in their work and can provide examples, it's likely that the student's ability to relate to that work is very limited. The reinforcement that all this time spent learning Math is pointless is much stronger than the reinforcement that it's important or useful. Getting a kid to crank through 20 or 30 algebra problems is much harder than say, a 5 paragraph essay for English class because the entire time they're doing this they're saying to themselves "why am I doing this? Math is useless! At least learning to write a little has some kind of use!"
But children will play "pointless" games for hours and hours and hours - and not even ones they're especially having fun with, just ones that hold their interest (if you've ever watched a 9 year old vent frustration at their Xbox you'll know what I mean). If we can turn Mathematics education into a kind of "game", then fill in the details and formal bits as they age, they'll at least be able to relate to it even if they don't understand the application or relevancy.
And the truth is, once you get to Calculus and get it, it's actually pretty fun and pretty easy. That's a high enough discipline for most STEM jobs and I firmly believe that every K-12 student should be able to do what we call "college level" Calculus by the 10th grade. So why not try to capture the things that make Mathematics at that level fun and easy, and I think that's the symbolic manipulation, even if it is hard to establish relevancy, and get them used to doing it from a very early age. Kids can move blocks around and stack them before they can walk, why can't the blocks be bits of equations? And why can't moving the blocks have little game-like rules they can learn?