Covid-19 discussion

[4liters]

whatever happened to 1+1 =2

I think that's part of the high school curriculum

[DougieK]

It got taken off facebook for some reason.

But this is pretty much my exact experience trying to help my 12yo with homeschool maths, and i'm a god damned teacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYk3tsUH1x8

[purple5ive]

whatever happened to 1+1 =2

I think that's part of the high school curriculum

yeah i understand that,
but i was never taught like that, so imagine me trying to help my kids at home with their homework. i can see it ending badly

i never did my schooling here, so that makes it extra hard.
i just don't understand why they confuse the poor kids.

[purple5ive]

It got taken off facebook for some reason.

But this is pretty much my exact experience trying to help my 12yo with homeschool maths, and i'm a god damned teacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYk3tsUH1x8

Thats exactly what im trying to say..
i was taught the way the guy is doing it at the start.

The second method is well, i don't even know how the **** it works lmao !!!

[ChrisTaylor]

And how do you go about keeping up with the new fandangled changes to working things out? It's mightily embarrassing to have a teacher email back a year 8 maths test with a giant fail mark because the way you learnt to work it out in apparent ancient times and advised the kid to do is the complete opposite of what 13 year olds learn now. Even though the answers to all 63 equations were correct....

It's perhaps less relevant to my role now, but I always tried to make clear to students there were multiple ways to approach maths problems -- and the best one was the one that led them to the right answer. Bonus points if their method was fast. If it was mum or dad's method from years ago, something they learnt back in Pakistan, or one of the speedy retail worker-style addition methods I taught them? Didn't really matter, although it'd be nice if they knew more than one strategy. I just wanted to make sure they could solve maths problems in situations that didn't look precisely like something from a textbook -- which is usually where methods based on remembering a series of facts reveal their flaws. I taught Grade 1 for a while, and it was pretty common to kick off the year with some parent bringing in a child, and alerting you to the child's genius status by having the child regurgitate the times tables. The times tables are far from useless, but the child's ability to recite 'em at age six didn't mean the child was capable of actually solving a problem.

In my experience, at least, meetings and the revised policy documents and etc usually aren't about how to teach -- like, the nuts-and-bolts specific of what you do day-to-day. They're mostly about 'big ideas', or ways of handling data, or some new priority that's rolled down hill from someone in authority. Often they're re-branding old ideas. Often they're, yes, taking something commonsense and bundling it up as an online module, just so they can say they've given you x amount of on-the-job training. It's not so much reinventing the wheel as occasionally having to put new tyres on, and someone getting really specific about the tread pattern. A lot of what flows down is vague, and it's up to the individual to interpret it for use in the classroom. The primary maths curriculum, for instance, implies a lot ... and one teacher may or may not pick up on everything that's there. It's structured as a series of statements, and it's too often treated as a sort of checklist ... when the document's a fair bit deeper than that. Sometimes the changes we face -- like the restructuring of some parts of the curriculum are basically good ideas that've run through one too many sets of hands before they arrive in the classroom.

EDIT

I guess, also, there's the home school issue. The classroom is an environment I can control. In a conversation with a student, there's back-and-forth -- I can read through their behaviour, or the work they turn in, if they're stuck or confused. With the home school situation there's some communication (hopefully) but mostly I'm just uploading tasks and relying on the parents or older siblings for this support. The child doesn't have access to peers, resources, to me, to support staff. The environment is wholly different. If the child turns in work, but they've handled things differently to how they would in the classroom, well ... there's nothing I can do about it. In the current situation, when the child could be playing Fortnite, they're doing their bloody work! I'm happy. If they've got a mother and/or father who are supporting them, that's fantastic. It doesn't matter if the support the parents provide looks considerably different to the support I'd provide in the classroom. Some teachers are perhaps less flexible.

[DougieK]

It got taken off facebook for some reason.

But this is pretty much my exact experience trying to help my 12yo with homeschool maths, and i'm a god damned teacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYk3tsUH1x8

Thats exactly what im trying to say..
i was taught the way the guy is doing it at the start.

The second method is well, i don't even know how the **** it works lmao !!!

It becomes relevant when you get into simultaneous equations and quadratic function whatevers. But to a 12yo who's dad taught him how to multiply, it's impossible to explain why he should spend 5 minutes doing something that should take 30 seconds.

[DougieK]

It got taken off facebook for some reason.

But this is pretty much my exact experience trying to help my 12yo with homeschool maths, and i'm a god damned teacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYk3tsUH1x8

Thats exactly what im trying to say..
i was taught the way the guy is doing it at the start.

The second method is well, i don't even know how the **** it works lmao !!!

It becomes relevant when you get into simultaneous equations and quadratic function whatevers. But to a 12yo who's dad taught him how to multiply, it's impossible to explain why he should spend 5 minutes doing something that should take 30 seconds.

Although, in his defence, his geography teacher thought Africa was a country.

[frozenpod]

It got taken off facebook for some reason.

But this is pretty much my exact experience trying to help my 12yo with homeschool maths, and i'm a god damned teacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYk3tsUH1x8

Both methods are correct the longer version is simply further breaking down the numbers which could be helpful with more complicated problems and teaching matrices etc.

Is it worth it, probably not as for 99% of people the quicker method is all they will need to know and the more complicated method does not directly translate to the other applications anyway.

[Texas]

Thanks for the video, it explains heaps.
I can see where the new method is better for such things as simultaneous equations and quadratic functions etc, while the older version is fine for simple multiplication.
But, just a question, wtf are simultaneous equations & quadratic functions ?????
Why We did logarithms, I never really understood
A fraction of my younger days
Gra

[croe04]

Thanks for the video, it explains heaps.
I can see where the new method is better for such things as simultaneous equations and quadratic functions etc, while the older version is fine for simple multiplication.
But, just a question, wtf are simultaneous equations & quadratic functions ?????
Why We did logarithms, I never really understood
A fraction of my younger days
Gra

Quadratic function is an algebraic expression that looks like f(x) = ax^2 + bx + c and takes the form of a parabola on a cartesian plane

Simultaneous equations are a pair of equations like 5x + 2y = 11 and 2y - 3x = 9 which are subtracted from eachother to find the value of the unknowns (x and y)

Finally getting some use out of my highschool maths courses
Even for algebra that second method confuses me, why make it so convoluted when most of it's done in your head?