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evening_tsarI am going to shoot those jerks who design math websites.
Those designers are the same jerks who used to write math text books. Different media same problem - or same shit different pile.
Confession time: I'm really not a maths person, and I was a wretched maths student (though I got all my credits and passed all my courses). Ironically enough, this has made me, under certain circumstances and among certain individuals, a somewhat effective maths teacher. Not amongst the eggsheads of course - kids who pick it up instinctively will be miles ahead of me, and grown-ups who were always good at it will never come to see me anyway. But I can help strugglers. I can turn on the lights in their brain, because I've BEEN there - I know what they're thinking, I know what they're going through, I know what's holding them up because it's the same stuff that held me up - and I know how to get through it. I teach them the way I wish I had been taught, and it works.
The trouble is never-ever stupidity - it's getting tripped up over steps. Math is all about steps - the only difference between nuclear physics and basic addition is the number of steps involved. I tell people that they're NOT bad at math - they just have trouble with the steps. If they can just master the steps - one at a time, at their own pace - they can master anything in the book/test/exam. And - barring diagnosed learning disabilities - I am never wrong.
But I have an enemy, a saboteur, a Judas that seeks to undermine my efforts - those despicable folk who write textbooks (and the websites that succeeded them). These by and large are designed by experts, people who aced it in school, to whom this stuff comes naturally. They have no concept of the difficulties certain learners may be facing, because they themselves have never faced them. They think nothing of switching an integer, adding a decimal, or throwing in a fraction, neither knowing nor caring that to a struggling learner, this is the equivalent of being thrown an anchor. These concepts are not as intuitive as the authors seem to think they are.
So two things tend to happen. First, the exemplar or demonstration will be incredibly easy, and of no use to solving the questions that follow. Then, the practice questions will involve variations not covered in the demo - moving on to new concepts before the initial concepts have been solidified. In a way they're saying "Got that? Great! Here's a harder one." It doesn't occur to them that the answer might be "no."
I remember being young, struggling with reams of text book questions. In frustration, I'd check the answer key, and a little light would go off. "Aha!" I'd think. "That's how they did it! Let's give the next one a try. . ." But the next one would be completely different. I had no chance to practice what I'd just learned, no chance try it again. The cycle of frustration started all over again, and I dropped math the minute I could.
I'll bet that's happened to a lot of people.
Part of the problem is that repetition - "drill kill" - is deeply unfashionable in pedagogic circles. Students are now expected to "discover" solutions, to the chagrin of student and teacher alike. Advocates of this method seem to think that students already struggling will magically figure things out, as if algebraic equations came naturally to them. dancing in their heads like Christmas eve sugar-plums. I was in school just time to see the beginnings of this method taking hold, and felt like I'd been tossed into the deep. I could figure out anything if given the formula - but if they expected me to come up with the formula, forget it.
That's part of it. The other part is, as I said, this stuff's prepared by the experts, and it doesn't always occur to experts that not everyone is an expert.
Those designers are the same jerks who used to write math text books. Different media same problem - or same shit different pile.
Confession time: I'm really not a maths person, and I was a wretched maths student (though I got all my credits and passed all my courses). Ironically enough, this has made me, under certain circumstances and among certain individuals, a somewhat effective maths teacher. Not amongst the eggsheads of course - kids who pick it up instinctively will be miles ahead of me, and grown-ups who were always good at it will never come to see me anyway. But I can help strugglers. I can turn on the lights in their brain, because I've BEEN there - I know what they're thinking, I know what they're going through, I know what's holding them up because it's the same stuff that held me up - and I know how to get through it. I teach them the way I wish I had been taught, and it works.
The trouble is never-ever stupidity - it's getting tripped up over steps. Math is all about steps - the only difference between nuclear physics and basic addition is the number of steps involved. I tell people that they're NOT bad at math - they just have trouble with the steps. If they can just master the steps - one at a time, at their own pace - they can master anything in the book/test/exam. And - barring diagnosed learning disabilities - I am never wrong.
But I have an enemy, a saboteur, a Judas that seeks to undermine my efforts - those despicable folk who write textbooks (and the websites that succeeded them). These by and large are designed by experts, people who aced it in school, to whom this stuff comes naturally. They have no concept of the difficulties certain learners may be facing, because they themselves have never faced them. They think nothing of switching an integer, adding a decimal, or throwing in a fraction, neither knowing nor caring that to a struggling learner, this is the equivalent of being thrown an anchor. These concepts are not as intuitive as the authors seem to think they are.
So two things tend to happen. First, the exemplar or demonstration will be incredibly easy, and of no use to solving the questions that follow. Then, the practice questions will involve variations not covered in the demo - moving on to new concepts before the initial concepts have been solidified. In a way they're saying "Got that? Great! Here's a harder one." It doesn't occur to them that the answer might be "no."
I remember being young, struggling with reams of text book questions. In frustration, I'd check the answer key, and a little light would go off. "Aha!" I'd think. "That's how they did it! Let's give the next one a try. . ." But the next one would be completely different. I had no chance to practice what I'd just learned, no chance try it again. The cycle of frustration started all over again, and I dropped math the minute I could.
I'll bet that's happened to a lot of people.
Part of the problem is that repetition - "drill kill" - is deeply unfashionable in pedagogic circles. Students are now expected to "discover" solutions, to the chagrin of student and teacher alike. Advocates of this method seem to think that students already struggling will magically figure things out, as if algebraic equations came naturally to them. dancing in their heads like Christmas eve sugar-plums. I was in school just time to see the beginnings of this method taking hold, and felt like I'd been tossed into the deep. I could figure out anything if given the formula - but if they expected me to come up with the formula, forget it.
That's part of it. The other part is, as I said, this stuff's prepared by the experts, and it doesn't always occur to experts that not everyone is an expert.
