I Had A Random Thought...

[Dewar]

My wife is currently studying for her JLPT level 1 test in December. I'll see if I can get her to come on and give some advice.

[Twig]

That'd be great! I'll gladly take and accept all advice.

 

I was also thinking of maybe getting Rosetta Stone, but I've heard mixed things. I imagine it's one of those things that either works or doesn't work for an individual, but it's such a steep buy-in I don't want to waste my money if I fall in the second category.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Hey, all you losers/poor souls who never got to play 80 Days because of mobile games being awkward. It's out on Steam now! It's apparently nice and crisp, and has even more Content^TM than before.

 

For all us losers that played it on mobile, we get the new content as a free update!

[Dewar]

Nice, I might buy the Steam version, just to have another copy since my (work) iPad is getting full.

[Zeusthecat]

Can someone please help me help my daughter with her common core math homework. I'm so unfamiliar with these new terms and approaches to these basic concepts and it makes no sense to my daughter either as I have been teaching her the traditional way for the last few years before she hit first grade.

[Gormongous]

I just finished the first draft of a two thousand-word grant proposal and I'm never going to get a grant because I'm from the Midwest and I deeply hate having to talk up myself and the significance of my dissertation. There's never been a monograph in English on the noble family that I study, despite them being leaders of multiple crusades and cousins of multiple kings and emperors, please give me $30,000 please, I do not want to adjunct for pennies.

[jennegatron]

Interpreting the worksheet, doubles is, as your daughter started, numbers plus themselves

 

Doubles + 1 seem to be a number plus a number that is one bigger (so 3 + 4) would be a double plus one

+1 is just any question that is a number plus one (5 + 1) etc

+2 is just any question that is a number plus two (4 + 2) etc

 

I had to look up mentally visualized 5 groups, but it's essentially how you do tally marks. It's easier to group things up into fives, so when you add 8 + 3

(or ooooo ooo + ooo) you can see that if you take two o's from 3, and add them to the 3 leftover o's from 8 you get (ooooo ooooo o) to get 11.

 

 

All of these are tricks to try and reduce your memorization (so you memorize only the doubles which are easy to memorize, and then you can make smaller additions that are easier to remember and do in your head.)

 

I know a lot of people hate common core, but they're really just trying to find more intuitive ways to teach kids math, because just repeating the thing over and over doesn't actually inspire deeper understanding of math.

[SecretAsianMan]

That's how I've always done math despite never being taught it.  I never realized it had a name or that it was becoming a standard thing to teach.

[Griddlelol]

I think a lot of people hate it because of how it's worded. There's loads of jargon in there, and strangely worded questions, but yeah, that is exactly how I do it in my head. 

[dibs]

There is a post going around Facebook of childhood memories with the tag line "I'm so glad i grew up when there was no technology". Items in the album include a gameboy, a tamogachi, many tv shows and videos, a picture of a tv, pringles and bubble wrap.

[Jutranjo]

I'm glad we grew up near a Tamagochi mine, they were almost free for any kid who came by when the shifts were ending.

[Mangela Lansbury]

I transitioned to an iPhone and have an app that lets me save articles to read straight from my Twitter feed now. On the plus side, I will never run out of news to read. On the minus side, soon I will be weeks behind because I have so much news to read saved up.

[eot]

I hate reading things on a phone, or doing any kind of browsing really. Typing is even worse. I don't know how people stand it, or enjoy it (which they must do, considering how many faces you see buried in phones).

[Twig]

I hate reading things on a phone, or doing any kind of browsing really. Typing is even worse. I don't know how people stand it, or enjoy it (which they must do, considering how many faces you see buried in phones).

I'm right there with you.

 

I do it when I'm really bored while waiting for a bus, or when I need to because I have to look something up, but reading entire articles on my phone is incredibly irritating.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Have you tried using an absurdly large phone

[Twig]

I'm happy with my S5, any bigger than that and it'd be a hassle to carry around.

 

But that wouldn't solve my main issue which is bright-ass LCD screen up in my face-space making me go blind.

 

---

 

Unrelated: I have something in my eye and it's like way deep in there and it's driving me fucking MAD

[Zeusthecat]

Interpreting the worksheet, doubles is, as your daughter started, numbers plus themselves

 

Thanks for the response. I'm reserving final judgment on the common core curriculum for now as I can see that it provides some valuable perspective that helps make math easier to understand. My main issue so far is that while it reduces the need for memorization, there is that initial learning curve of understanding exactly what all of their new terms mean and what exactly they are asking you to do when they say 'Doubles', 'Doubles + 1', '+1', '+2', and 'mentally visualized five groups'. I just have my doubts that this new approach can be successful when it is suddenly dictated that this is the new way kids are supposed to do math (and in my daughter's class, the only way she is allowed to do math) with no guarantee that all of the parents and teachers out there have been briefed on what these concepts mean and how to communicate them and help children understand them. My daughter claims that her teacher just gives her these worksheets with no explanation as to what those terms mean. Now of course she might just not be paying attention but given how contentious this common core thing has been, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of teachers that have been teaching math for years fucking hate this new way of doing it and either refuse to learn it themselves or refuse to put the effort in to make sure their kids understand it because they want it to fail or something.

 

And I'm not entirely sold that the problem so many people have with math is the whole memorization part. Literally every other subject like history, spelling, English, vocabulary, etc. all require memorization and on average, people seem to have much less of an issue with those subjects. I don't see why it works with all these other subjects but then the memorization angle falls down when it comes to math. You learn your basic addition and subtraction with small numbers until you understand how that works, then you memorize those easy ones and extrapolate to harder numbers and harder concepts. I don't think there is anything fundamentally more confusing about how that works and I think at the very least, children should be given the option to solve math problems the traditional way if that is the way that makes sense to them. I'll be interested to see how this curriculum pans out but my suspicion is that it won't produce noticeably better results because I think the real issue with math is that there are so few people that are capable of communicating math concepts to children in an easy to understand way. When I have had those excellent math teachers, even with everyone using these supposedly difficult traditional concepts, it was striking how much better everyone did in that class than in those classes with less effective teachers.

[Bjorn]

Have you tried using an absurdly large phone

 

I hate to admit it, but after getting Nexus 6, I'd have a real hard time going back to anything smaller.

[Griddlelol]

I think the real issue with math is that there are so few people that are capable of communicating math concepts to children in an easy to understand way. When I have had those excellent math teachers, even with everyone using these supposedly difficult traditional concepts, it was striking how much better everyone did in that class than in those classes with less effective teachers.

I completely agree. Explaining numbers is hard, and at primary school (elementary?) level, most teachers have very little understanding of maths. I was living with a girl who became a primary school teacher after a history degree. She had not done maths as a formal subject in 7 years by the time she had finished her degree. She could barely do more than basic arithmetic. It's utterly ridiculous that she was expected to teach maths to children, when she barely grasped it herself.

On the other hand, my high school maths teacher was fucking smart. Really fucking smart. She went on a maths competition tv show after I graduated. However, she was an awful teacher. Getting something explained involved her coming over, doing the problem for you then walking away. I learned nothing in those years and basically had to teach myself some algebra and logarithmic fundamentals when I went to university since I never learned them in high school.

Definitely feel like the school system let me down when it comes to maths, and plenty of other people. If it's not something you naturally grasp, if you aren't lucky enough to have a great teacher, good fucking luck.

[jennegatron]

No problem Zeus! I have a lot of thoughts about math & math curriculum & how math is taught & how math is absorbed/learned by students as well as how those experiences color perceptions of math for life.

 

I had already graduated when common core was starting to be implemented, so I'm not intimately familiar with the details of it, but I did spend much of my year after graduating college (2013-2014) tutoring kids K through college, and came across some of it. I understand it's frustrating to be less well equipped at helping your children (not just you, but many people) with subjects that you may have been good at in school! I think that many parents don't trust school systems and curriculum writers especially after things like No Child Left Behind. And the vocabulary they use (like doubles or 5 group visualization) is totally removed from what any previous generation of students used that it leaves tutors & parents alike at a loss for how to help, especially if there isn't a text book for a parent to go through or a text book that uses different vocab than the teacher did in class.

 

 

General Math Thoughts Not About Common Core 

I frequently encounter people who think they're "bad at math" when in reality they had a bad experience in middle school and have decided that they'll never be good at math, as though all math is arithmetic or algebra. The thing that makes me angriest is when people complain that adding variables is needless and makes things too complicated, as if every math problem with an unknown component is 100% created by some sort of shadowy intellectual group forcing children of the world to us their dark magic math. IT MAKES ME SO ANGRY.

 

 

I see a lot of resistance is based in "This isn't how I did it, therefore it can't be any good, because I learned this other way that worked for me!" In most cases common core is interested in exposing kids to multiple techniques for solving a problem to find the one that works best for them. Like there are cases where a doubles plus 2 problem could be solved equally correctly by visualizing 5 groups. I remember being scolded by my 5/6th grade math teacher for utilizing tricks I learned in elementary school to help with addition, because she thought I should have memorized that 8+3 is 11. I still get mad about this. Like if I get to the right answer, what is it to you that I count up to 11 from 8 using the 3. I have a math degree and still use that same technique that my first grade teacher taught me! (Shout out to Mrs. Hayes & Mrs. Giannoulias)

 

(I think it's different to grasp mathematical concepts than traditional language, which is where the memorization of spelling words & history and the like land, as opposed to memorizing that 8 + 5 = 13. 8 and 5 and 13 are abstract concepts that can be harder to understand for people, children & adults alike.)

 

Griddlelol: In the US if you want to be a teacher (at not a magnet school) you have to hold accreditation from your state that you're qualified to teach, so if you're a K-6 teacher, you have to have a certificate from the state that says you can teach math, because you have to teach all the subjects when you're teaching elementary school. So even though I have a mathematics degree, no school would hire me to teach Calculus to high schoolers because I don't have a certificate from the state.

[Zeusthecat]

I see a lot of resistance is based in "This isn't how I did it, therefore it can't be any good, because I learned this other way that worked for me!" In most cases common core is interested in exposing kids to multiple techniques for solving a problem to find the one that works best for them. Like there are cases where a doubles plus 2 problem could be solved equally correctly by visualizing 5 groups. I remember being scolded by my 5/6th grade math teacher for utilizing tricks I learned in elementary school to help with addition, because she thought I should have memorized that 8+3 is 11. I still get mad about this. Like if I get to the right answer, what is it to you that I count up to 11 from 8 using the 3. I have a math degree and still use that same technique that my first grade teacher taught me! (Shout out to Mrs. Hayes & Mrs. Giannoulias)

 

Yeah, it is unfortunate that people just dismiss it out of hand like that. It's definitely not a bad approach to take for math. But I think your example touches on my primary issue with the way math (and what I've seen so far with this first year of common core stuff) is presented to kids. Forcing people to do problems a very specific way and not allowing them the freedom to learn and exploit all of the countless techniques and tricks to make numbers work in a sensible way is such an impediment to them mentally navigating through these concepts. God, if I had to solve all of my Fourier transforms in the specific way that one of my not so great teachers may have taught me in college, I would have never gotten through that stuff. 

[eot]

Inventing names and mnemonics for every rule and every operation bothers me. It's not something I've been exposed to much myself, but it's a preconceived notion I have about math teaching in the US. For example, I've never seen 'sec' used in anything but american textbooks, to me it's completely redundant and adds no clarity. Mnemonics bother me because they make math seem like it's about memorising arbitrary rules. For example, there's apparently a rule called FOIL for multiplying expressions like (a+*(c+d). Memorising how to do that serves no other purpose than to make you better at working through 20 of problems like that in a row.

There's a well known rant on the subject of math education. It argues for a unreasonably radical shift in the way we teach math, but it's a well written and thought provoking piece of text nontheless. It's called A Mathematician’s Lament. It's 25 pages though.

[jennegatron]

1. I have no idea what "sec" is supposed to mean in this context

2. I'm actually a constant user of FOIL, as it helps me make sure I don't forget any of the combinations when multiplying 2 binomials together, as FOIL was always paired with the physical drawing of lines connecting all the terms you were multiplying together, which I then extended to using when multiplying polynomials of higher order & more terms.

 

Math is taught as a reasonless set of rules that you abide by up until you get into discrete math & abstract algebra and learn how proofs work and stuff. I understand why they treat math as a magic black box, as you have to teach a lot of seemingly unrelated things to build up the foundation of how addition works in a commutative group. It's not ideal though. In order to understand a math textbook you almost always have to know more math than the book is meant to teach (this is especially true up through calculus if you haven't had a discrete math class)

 

(Other tricks I regularly use when doing math: SohCahToa to remember the trig relationships on a right triangle, the memorization of the product & quotient rules in calculus for derivatives & the quadratic formula)

[tberton]

Don't want to insert myself too much into this conversation, but I will say, Zeus, that memorization is actually a terrible way of teaching other subjects, such as language or history. Something like spelling, which in most cases is pretty arbitrary, requires memorization, but for subjects that, at a high level, require more critical thinking than memorization, teaching things by rote by start is just going to turn people off.

[Zeusthecat]

Don't want to insert myself too much into this conversation, but I will say, Zeus, that memorization is actually a terrible way of teaching other subjects, such as language or history. Something like spelling, which in most cases is pretty arbitrary, requires memorization, but for subjects that, at a high level, require more critical thinking than memorization, teaching things by rote by start is just going to turn people off.

 

I get what you're saying. But when you have a question on a history test asking what date a certain event occurred, no amount of critical thinking is going to produce the answer you need to write down. The metrics that people are graded on in many subjects do tend to rely on lots of memorization in my experience and yet people still do fine in these subjects relative to math.