The Math Professor doesn't understand it either - Mathematics education is broken.
The joy and power of what we learn in school has been rang out from the curriculum. This article from the Guardian, by Donna Ferguson mirrors my own experience trying to help students with the high school math. Instead of teaching them interesting things, there is too much emphasis on making testable questions, and multiple ways to get at the same concept. Having all children learn 3 different ways to accomplish the same thing slows down the process such that they don’t get time for interesting things. proving an intense depth of unecessary vocabulary and detail that drains the soul of the subject. My similar experience is of confusion trying to help family with very simple math concepts, presented in very complicated ways and being used to separate children into smart and dumb based on irrelevant tests. At these levels the vast majority of students should be getting A grades - theses are simple concepts being taught by competent teachers.
Worst, when children ask “Will I ever use this in real life?” the truth is they will not, as spending too much time on irrelevant things has left no time for teaching cool and useful things.
This is particularly important today where computers have changed the way we do math, and new fields such as statistics, machine learning and information theory have come along, have changed the world, and the affect math has on us in real life is greater than ever - and impenetrable to high school graduates.
- My suggestion is a new survey course for the end of high school - a light survey of all the things we use math for - not just calculus and differential equations. And for each subject surveyed there must be an explanation of how this subject affects our lives or changes our knowledge of the world - i.e. for every subject and answer to the question Will I ever use this in real life?
“ “I’d never heard of a ‘bar model’ or a ‘part-whole model’. I had to get my kids to teach me.” He was shocked by how many of these different, “intimidating” methods and models primary school children are expected to use to solve basic maths problems. “I’ve never needed to use them – you don’t need to know all these different mental models to do maths,” he says.”