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My son's experience illustrates a problem with math teaching. He's current a PhD candidate in Computational Biology, with a BS in Computer Science. You'd think he'd be pretty good in math, right? Yet when he got to grad school he felt he needed to re-educate himself in math from the ground up, because it was clear to him that he had never really understood much of it.

Thinking back, I remember one Grade 2/3 teacher who was incapable of distinguishing between calculating area and volume, and another who openly admitted to the children that she had never been any good at math and it was okay not to be good at it. She also insisted on teaching "touch math" to 2nd/3rd graders, so they could perform addition by counting dots rather than by simply knowing basic sums.

So whatever we do now is going to be a problem for a long time, because the teachers we have now are products of this same system, and may very well not truly understand math. How do we address that as we go forward?

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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