Post by thekindercarebear on Oct 13, 2020 20:32:50 GMT
Yay...
Seriously we westerners need to stop making up excuses for our blatantly obvious educational failures.
How it Works
Mighton has identified two major problems in how we teach math. First, we overload kids’ brains, moving too quickly from the concrete to the abstract. That puts too much stress on working memory. Second, we divide classes by ability, or “stream”, creating hierarchies which disable the weakest learners while not benefitting the top ones.
Mighton argues that over the past decade, the US and Canada have moved to a “discovery” or “inquiry” based approach to math by which kids are meant to figure out a lot of concepts on their own. The example he offers in this Scientific American article is this:
“Discovery-based lessons tend to focus less on problems that can be solved by following a general rule, procedure or formula (such as “find the perimeter of a rectangle five meters long and four meters wide”) and more on complex problems based on real-world examples that can be tackled in more than one way and have more than one solution (“using six square tiles, make a model of a patio that has the least possible perimeter”)”
Solomon said this approach—also called problem-based learning—means the teachers’ role is not to provide direct instruction, but to let kids collaborate to find solutions to complex, realistic problems which have multiple approaches and answers. But too many children don’t have the building blocks from which to discover the answers. They get frustrated, and then fixed in the belief that they are not “math people.”
A key problem with this method is it requires kids to have too much happening in their brains at one time. ”This is very difficult for teachers,” said Solomon, and “it’s very difficult for kids.”
Mighton has identified two major problems in how we teach math. First, we overload kids’ brains, moving too quickly from the concrete to the abstract. That puts too much stress on working memory. Second, we divide classes by ability, or “stream”, creating hierarchies which disable the weakest learners while not benefitting the top ones.
Mighton argues that over the past decade, the US and Canada have moved to a “discovery” or “inquiry” based approach to math by which kids are meant to figure out a lot of concepts on their own. The example he offers in this Scientific American article is this:
“Discovery-based lessons tend to focus less on problems that can be solved by following a general rule, procedure or formula (such as “find the perimeter of a rectangle five meters long and four meters wide”) and more on complex problems based on real-world examples that can be tackled in more than one way and have more than one solution (“using six square tiles, make a model of a patio that has the least possible perimeter”)”
Solomon said this approach—also called problem-based learning—means the teachers’ role is not to provide direct instruction, but to let kids collaborate to find solutions to complex, realistic problems which have multiple approaches and answers. But too many children don’t have the building blocks from which to discover the answers. They get frustrated, and then fixed in the belief that they are not “math people.”
A key problem with this method is it requires kids to have too much happening in their brains at one time. ”This is very difficult for teachers,” said Solomon, and “it’s very difficult for kids.”
To explain the concept to me, he took a basic question—what is 72 divided by 3? He showed me multiple ways to do it.
It is 24. 24 x 3 = 72.
While we're using pictures of 72 pies and trying to divide it between 3 clowns over the span of the next 15 minutes, easterners will just answer 24...