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Old 08-23-2018, 09:31 PM
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lisarea lisarea is offline
Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
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Default Re: Fucking education! How does it work?

I've probably told this story before, but when I started high school, they'd test students to determine which class they went to, and I tested into the advanced math class, and it suuuuucked on almost every level.

I mean, when I first walked in, the teacher thought I was lost, so I showed him my schedule and he called the office thinking they'd made a mistake, and I was thirteen and I'd just moved there a couple weeks earlier and I was the only girl in the room and everyone was staring at me and I thought I was going to throw up. I include this as a preamble, and for context.

Anyway, that guy accused me of cheating constantly, and always publicly. He told us to show our work, which I assumed meant that I should include the notes I needed to write down, but apparently, he meant we had to write down every single step of everything we did, including simple addition and subtraction and other things you'd just do in your head, in standard format. He accused me of copying someone else's work.

Another time, I worked out some problems he'd given us, and he accused me of cheating because I hadn't used the longer, stupider formula he'd had us memorize, and he said--wait for it--I couldn't have solved the problem myself, because it was impossible unless you'd memorized the formula. He--the high school AP math teacher--had no concept of how math even worked at all. I don't know if he thought it was magic, or if maybe he thought 'math' was some artificial, prescriptive construct that people had invented, or what. He literally didn't know that you could figure out math problems.

I don't know if they talk about this in that article because I skimmed over parts of it, but there have been proposals that we should stop teaching math as a discrete subject, and like this guy says, apply it, but in the context of other topics. It sounds scary at first the idea of eliminating it from grade schools and all, but it's obviously not working. Maybe "math class" could be a one-off deal, where sometime in high school or so, you learn things like orders of operation and what different symbols mean, sort of how they used to teach shorthand and typing and stuff. Because that's all that really is: It's just a shorthand way to transcribe things.
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