Modern math

doofus said:

My daughter is 7 she comes home and I help her with homework. Some of the math she comes home with I truly do not understand. The rest is the longest most tedious way to work a problem. No professional meaning engineer, physicist types could ever afford to draw out simple math like that. I love the op!

Click to expand...

That's the problem is it's not math for engineers and scientists. It's math for people who flip burgers. We are educating a generation of burger flippers I am really glad I don't have kids and if I did they would be in private school. Back 30 years ago when standardized testing first came out most private schools opted out of the testing because we simply scored too high. Instead of a bell curve all students scored within 95%. That makes public schools look really bad and the test foolish.

A friend of mine is a kindergarten teacher and her classes usually have kids that may know their colors, numbers and letters and other kids that can read a newspaper and do some algebra. How to you teach in a situation like that? You bump the kindergartener to second grade and that's not fair to them.

"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas". Albert Einstein

I think, they are trying to teach the kids why 12*5=60 vs just memorizing it. My 3rd grader's math homework solved 12*5=60 by doing something like 10*5=50, 2*5=10, and 50+10=60. They called it decomposing the 12. This worked for my daughter because the "tens" and "twos" tables are "easy." She was able to do some of the problems in her head using this method. This is the method I intuitively use if doing something in the head. I just wasn't taught this way, I was told to memorize it.

When I was in engineering school, I remember someone asking the Dynamics profession why we needed to solve these 5 equations for the 5 unknowns when a computer program can give the answers within seconds. His answer was that even with the computers, we still needed to understand where the numbers come from and why it works out. Looking back, I fully agree.

They also teach multiply ways to solve simple problems. This may be beneficial as different kids may understand things differently.

But I agree that the teacher who marked 5*5*5=15 as wrong isn't helping.

In addition to all that. She is expected to practice with flashcards.

That new math reminds me of this.

But honestly, growing up we had to learn multiplication tables so that doing higher level math or "real world" math would be easier, since you wont have a calculator everywhere you go. Nowdays our cellphones are computers, so why cant schools teach kids how to use calculators, or do math in a logical way so that they can start the higher level abstract math, like trig, or calculus earlier.

I would not have believed it had you not shown a picture.

imatabor said:

And here is the picture of the 5x3 question the kid who got this wrong on his test...

Click to expand...

hydro-magic said:

Yeah, I'm totally lost trying to help my kid with 4th grade math these days. I'm no math whiz but I did at least get through a couple Calculus classes. The teachers want them to use 3 or 4 different methods to solve the same problem. To me it makes sense that maybe different kids will do better in one way or another so fine, have them figure out which method works for them. But after they figure that out, why force them to use the method that doesn't work well for them? Weird.

Click to expand...

The simplest method is to simply know. The next easiest method is to just use your Android. Either the calculator app, or ask.com. You can also just ask somebody smarter. Thats how the teacher gets the answer.

Math word problems are probably the only place where you can buy 17 cantaloupes and give away 9 and nobody asks WTH is wrong with you.

thematthatter said:

That new math reminds me of this.

But honestly, growing up we had to learn multiplication tables so that doing higher level math or "real world" math would be easier, since you wont have a calculator everywhere you go. Nowdays our cellphones are computers, so why cant schools teach kids how to use calculators, or do math in a logical way so that they can start the higher level abstract math, like trig, or calculus earlier.

Click to expand...

That's just basic logical operations. You should have seen my Digital Design Logic class in college where we had to figure the states of circuits. That was this on Nightmare difficulty. And speaking of nightmares, I still have the dreams...