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Relaxing
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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Math teachers, as a population, are abject failures. Every school day they do incalculable harm to the wellbeing of our society by taking everything in the fundamentals of instruction and doing the exact opposite. They not only fail to cause students to develop a functional understanding of the subject, they instill a pride in their students of that ignorance.
College math professors are no better and possibly worse. We call them "professors" because "teacher" is an incorrect descriptor. Very little teaching goes on in college classrooms.
this has a lot to do with resources and time. class size and student to teacher ratio will always have a huge impact on student learning. i really want to write that twice. plus in america, capitalism and zero-sum life is introduced in education by way of separating higher and lower scoring students, assigning students to 'gifted' classes. not being able to give enough support for students with disabilities, and separating them as well. and of course stability and support outside of the classroom/school is a big factor.
Granted, teaching 10 well-off adults is easier than 30 poor kids.
This doesn't explain why all math classes everywhere from about 6th grade and up are designed as if we're raising an entire generation of mathematicians. What good does memorizing proofs do? Why do we focus so much on the quadratic equation? Algebra is a useful skill that schools systematically beat a hatred for into the masses...in order to pretend they're doing something academic and scholarly?
I agree with you on the over emphasis of certain topics and the need to shift more to mathematical thinking rather than ending up with kids tending too much on (often short term) memorizing. Many students jump right to the quadratic eqtn because they are told it always works. Even when factoring might be simpler and more elegant. The common core was misunderstood by most folks, me included initially. But ~~that is~~ its goals are more towards mathematical thinking and connections as opposed to memorization and applying algorithms. Even simple ones such s stacked subtraction or multiplication. It's implementation was poorly done, teachers weren't trained and again the testing regime constraints bore down. But it's thinking more towards future though it too may need to speed up with changes.