Abso-damn-lutely, though not necessarily for exactly that reason. I hated and loathed math from the 5th grade on, with the exception of geometry; it wasn't taught in a way that made any sense to me at all. And in 7th grade my school switched to the New Math (base 2, base 7, sets, etc.), which my old-line teacher understood but couldn't teach for sour owl s**t. (And then in 8th grade it was back to conventional algebra.) Making sense of math instruction--and not screwing around with idiotic educationists' theoretical jokes--would be an enormous boon to students in the US.
I was a whiz in geometry. Not algebra, though. I blame my Algebra I teacher, who spent most of the class time telling us his life story. I missed out on the links between my earlier math and what came in Algebra II and never caught up.
At the beginning of the eighth grade I had mononucleosis and missed the first month of school. Thus, to pass the time, I worked every problem in my Algebra I book. Good teachers are important, but ultimately you learn by doing and by thinking about why you did what you did.
3 comments:
Abso-damn-lutely, though not necessarily for exactly that reason. I hated and loathed math from the 5th grade on, with the exception of geometry; it wasn't taught in a way that made any sense to me at all. And in 7th grade my school switched to the New Math (base 2, base 7, sets, etc.), which my old-line teacher understood but couldn't teach for sour owl s**t. (And then in 8th grade it was back to conventional algebra.) Making sense of math instruction--and not screwing around with idiotic educationists' theoretical jokes--would be an enormous boon to students in the US.
I was a whiz in geometry. Not algebra, though. I blame my Algebra I teacher, who spent most of the class time telling us his life story. I missed out on the links between my earlier math and what came in Algebra II and never caught up.
At the beginning of the eighth grade I had mononucleosis and missed the first month of school. Thus, to pass the time, I worked every problem in my Algebra I book. Good teachers are important, but ultimately you learn by doing and by thinking about why you did what you did.
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