Archive for: February 2007

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

That post (two posts back) was pretty high on the rant-scale, I admit. So be it. It should be tempered with a little praise for good teachers, though, and a reader left a very inspiring comment at it. Go check it out. It’s at the “Why you Suck at Math (Pt. I)” page.

Her comment inspires me to mention the two math teachers I remember who decidedly did not suck. Mr. Engel, the fifth-grade math teacher at St. Mark’s Avenue School in Bellmore, New York, way back in the 60’s was a very good teacher. He made me wonder why all the teachers who tried to teach me math in the earlier grades were so bad at it.

Unfortunately, sixth grade came around, and we had a major dork, which made me think Mr. Engel was a fluke. (He was!)

(more…)

Today I put up the podcast for the first of the lessons about multiplying by 3 from left-to-right on the Eating Math for Breakfast pages. I also put up the second lesson, but without the podcast. The podcast for that will go up tomorrow.

Sorry for the lateness, but we’ve had a lot of snow, and I’ve been spending most of my time shoveling, and going to the hospital for a routine procedure that men of my age should have. I won’t bore you with the details.

The day after tomorrow is my wife’s birthday, so it may be a slow couple of days for the Chronicles, but I promise to get at least one more podcast up.

Well, no, I don’t necessarily mean you. But it is a catchy title.

What I do want to address, though, is why so many people feel that they suck at math.

There are so many reasons. A major one is that they have never been introduced to math, just some bad imposter created by the public school system.

Math is a search for effective uses of patterns. Ok, it’s other things too, but what it is defitely not, is some psycho-nazi math teacher from hell telling you too “just shut up and do the problem!” It’s not some critical-thinking-challenged politician creating a deceptively-named “No Child Left Behind” scam, that does nothing but intimidate students with ineffective testing, and doesn’t even fund that.

The big reason that “you suck at math” is that the people who are paid to teach you, generally don’t know their asses from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

There, I said it.

Um, you do know what generally means, don’t you? I don’t want anyone who doesn’t know what that word means writing to me telling me that, “Gee, I know a teacher who actually does know his ass from KFC, etc.” I KNOW there are good teachers.

But:
a) There aren’t enough of them, and
b) they are not always paid (enough, anyway).

Here’s Professor Humunculus’s patented method for testing if a teacher or administrator is not part of the problem:

Just see if he/she is part of the solution, or at least knows there is a problem. If they are just happy as clams to test kids on material they didn’t have enough time to adequately teach them - THEN THEY SUCK!

On the other hand, if they are doing their best while fighting the system, advocating for smaller classes, less standardized testing and more quality teaching time, and time to prepare meaningful lessons, time to assess each child in a meaningful way, etc. then, brother, you have found a pearl among those clams. (Pardon the mixed seafood metaphor.)

Polish that pearl.

In other words, if the teacher isn’t at least in a little trouble with the administration (no, not the kind of trouble that Senators and preachers get into with young boys!) then you can pretty much figure that they order a bucket of ass when they go to KFC.

If, by any chance, you are a real, dedicated teacher reading this, I want to thank you for the real work you do. Someone appreciates you. I’d like to see more people do that. I’m trying to help.

This needs to be made clear: the higher you go, the bigger the B.S. You can’t blame an 11 year old that sh/e can’t add if the teacher can’t teach. You can’t blame the teacher if the administrators won’t let them teach. You can’t blame the administrators if the school boards and policy-makers only hold them accountable to some idiotic policies. And you can’t blame the policy-makers if -
hey, wait, that’s exactly whom you can blame, almost all of the time.

Likewise, within the family, you can’t blame a kid for not learning when a parent doesn’t at least provide an environment for learing and an attitude that learning is worthwhile. Not just “You better get good grades or no allowance,” or worse. Think about it. If the kid sees that the parent is a dumbass and resents learning…

Give the kids a break. Coercion is not help.

I’d love to see some comments. I’m on your side if you are fighting the good fight.

Today is a very special day. My wife is going to cook some t-bone steaks, but not for us - for our dogs!

Our oldest dog turns 6 (human) years old today. He is a wonderful golden retriever, named Galileo.

I’m going to take him and his wife (our other golden retriever, Maia, who will turn 6 in May) for a nice long walk in the frigid upstate New York country air, then we’ll spoil ‘em with steak and bones.

Maybe it will be a good day to learn how to use the video camera I bought. I got it to make some math instruction videos for mathmojo.com, but I’ll put up a video or picture or two of the dogs. After all, they are my constant companions as I sit at the computer and create more Math Mojo.

In about a week, on February 15, it will be the birthday of Galileo Galilei, who was pretty much the father of modern science.

Math for Math’s Sake (What a concept!)

I’m sure you’ve heard of the concept of “art for art’s sake.” That basically implies that the beauty of art is reason enough to pursue it.

The phrase (l’art pour l’art) is generally attributed to Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). He was rebelling against the Idea that, historically, art was used to push some third-party agenda, like some religious, political, or otherwise non-art-related Idea.

It sounds obvious to 20th and 21st century minds that art might not have to serve any purpose other than to enjoy it (after all, almost every child has made a painting or diorama for the fun of it). But for it’s day, l’art pour l’art was a very rebellious and subversive concept.

We haven’t progressed far enough, though, that most people realize that one of the reasons, if not the greatest of reasons, to have an interest in math is for the beauty and romance of math.

(more…)

This post is a continuation of the other posts about the video on YouTube entitled “An Inconvenient Truth” with M.J McDermott (not to be confused with Al Gore’s film) which concerns the dismal state of American basic math education in public schools. You can view it here.

M.J. had two good premises, but her conclusion does not jibe. “Their methods suck.” (True.) “My method is better.” (True.) “Therefore mine is the one everyone should use.” (Nahhhhh.)

Why don’t you experiment a lot and discover what works best for you, and keep refining it? It can be so much more fun and rewarding to do that. Respect your mind, not the opinions and emotional responses that were put there by others in the past. Try this stuff out, then decide.

It’s important to mention that people who think it’s OK not to learn the basic arithmetical operations because “you can do it with a calculator” are just plain damn dumb. That’s like saying, “Hey, this ‘walking’ stuff sucks. It takes effort! Why do we need to learn to walk? That takes years! Let’s just give everyone a wheelchair!’

(more…)