Response to YouTube Videos... What's your take?

Response to YouTube Videos... What's your take?

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It was a great perspective to see all three videos, Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth , Math Education: A response to “An Inconvenient Truth” Part 1 , and Math Education: A response to “An Inconvenient Truth” Part 2 It was great to see the different sides. The College Professor sat a bit on both sides of the fence. In this last video he discusses that math is being taught as abstract. Students developmentally do not start thinking abstract till they hit their early teens. Yet we are expected to teach students in the elementary grades to think abstractly. Students only worry about the here and the now. If it isn't relevant to me today, than why I should learn this... so you say I will use this in the future; my future is in 10 minutes when I go out to recess and if I should play with Bob or Jill. 

He goes on to say that math is useful, that it isn't a bunch of formulas. Rather that students need to think things out. It's the thought process and the understanding of numbers. He really didn't know the books that were being used, but what he could understand of the books and the few he knows, is that the books are trying to make math sensible and useful for students.

He goes on to make another good point; teachers don't always buy into the books. If the teacher teaching the math, from said book, doesn't buy into it than it won't be taught that way. I know many teachers who say yeah we did it the book way the first year and now I modify it to my liking. It seems to me and to the author of the second and third YouTube video, that we as adults, yes, even us teachers, can't get past the way we were taught math. I know personally I learned by a formula method. This is the formula memorize it and that’s it. I can tell you, so I memorized others I had no idea. 

He makes a point that you can't change the curriculum without changing the national tests. I feel that this shouldn't be true, unless they are looking for a specific formula, than yes this would be true. If the goal of the test if for students to answer the questions, show their work and get the question right, than we as teachers using other forms of learning math shouldn't sweat national tests. If these tests require specific formulas to pass, well than buckle up, for the next nine months you will be teaching for a test. Sadly most of the tests are at the beginning of the year and don't reflect your teaching and a summer break in their as well. 

I loved that he said the ultimate goal is for students to understand numbers, make sense of them and to also know the algorithms. Math needs to make sense for it to stick and for us to want to attempt to try it again down the road or to take interest in it again. Once the numbers make sense and you can look at a problem and work your way through it, than that is the time to practice. I would rather spend time teaching kids to think about the numbers and then having them practice and really understand, than to have to try to figure out where they went wrong and try and correct a process that they have wrongly engrained. 

You need to know how to think or you don't trust the process... if you don't trust the process would you keep trying or give up?... step in to an elementary students shoes for a moment to answer that question... Even as an adult, I'm not sure I would...