Excerpted from Is It True That Some People Just Can’t Do Math?
Category: Education
The Case For Fully Guided Instruction
- Decades of research clearly demonstrates that when teaching new information or skills, step-by-step instruction with full explanations works best.
- For novices, studying “worked examples” seems invariably superior to discovering or constructing a solution to a problem.
Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute
- Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
- And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills? “It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”
- Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree.
- Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.
- By concentrating on what, and leaving out the why, mathematics is reduced to an empty shell.
- But if your Math teacher gives you the impression that mathematics is about formulas and definitions, and memorizing algorithms, who will set you straight?
- …after being told they were “good at math”, that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions.
- Mathematics should be taught as art for art’s sake.
- School boards do not understand what mathematics is; neither do educators, textbook authors, publishing companies, and sadly, neither do most of our math teachers.
- Attempts to present mathematics as relevant to daily life inevitably appear forced and contrived…People enjoy fantasy, and that’s just what math can provide. An anodyne to the practical workday world.
- Circles: Which is more interesting, using a formula someone handed you without explanation, or hearing the story of one of the most beautiful, fascinating problems, and one of the most brilliant and powerful ideas in human history?
- So put away your lesson plans and overhead projectors, your full-color textbook abominations, your CD-ROMs and the whole rest of the traveling circus freak show of contemporary education, and simply do mathematics with the students!
- Would you accept as an art teacher someone who has never picked up a pencil or stepped foot in a museum? Why is it that we accept math teachers who have never produced an original piece of mathematics, …nothing in fact beyond what they are expected to present to their unfortunate students? What kind of a teacher is that? How can someone teach something that they themselves don’t do?
- It may be true that you have to be able to read in order to fill out forms at the DMV, but that’s not why we teach children to read.
Here’s a link to a article that is a follow-up to the famous Marshmallow study of the 1960s. Turns out, you can correlate SAT score and the ability to save for retirement as early as age two! Both require: delayed gratification, self-control, discipline, obedience, etc.
According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”