Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea
I especially like the second one, because it emphasizes the importance of the humanities for understanding any topic. And because obviously, the way we teach math is legitimately traumatic to a lot of people, to the point that even smart people's brains just shut down as soon as they see something that looks mathlike.
I've probably told this story before, maybe even in this thrad, but my brother and I were both, a few years apart, accused of cheating in algebra class because the teacher honestly didn't believe that you could do math any other way than simply by memorizing the formulas from math books. He wasn't just saying that the assignment was to solve the assigned problems using the formulas he taught. He genuinely seemed to think that the only way to solve a math problem was to memorize a specific formula and just apply it, and if you came up with the answer any other way, you obviously just copied it from somewhere and then made up the intermediary steps. This was in high school AP math classes. And that is fucked the fuck up.
|
Secondary teachers can be quite dogmatic that way, that's one of the reasons I quit teaching, and had problems with my daughters teachers. I like the idea of teaching the child to think and then give them the tables to memorize as they see the need. I was always bored with arithmetic where you just memorized useless information, without knowing the reason why you needed to know it. I had a similar problem with the piano, except the teacher neither explained why I should practice scales or even asking me to practice them. Scales and arpeggios would have been just what I needed for the genera of music I preferred.