How to Make Sure Your Child Fails Mathematics
It seems most Americans are doing a pretty good job of raising kids who can't do math, but I thought I would offer some pointers for those of you who want to up your game. Here's how to ensure your child hates math and never goes into a lucrative profession like engineering:
Instead of making them memorize their arithmetic facts, give them a calculator along with their first math book. This will ensure they can never quickly do calculations mentally, and will therefore require hours to do homework problems their ancestors could have done in 30 minutes.
Once arithmetic ignorance has been achieved, the rest is easy. Let them copy the answers to the odd problems from the back of the book and tell the teacher "They don't need to show their work because they did it all in their head." The teacher will never notice that all the odd problems have correct answers while the even problems are incorrect.
Now you are on a roll. Keep promoting that student to higher math classes despite their complete lack of arithmetic or algebra skills. Ask teachers to offer extra credit to compensate for the utter lack of actual math achievement.
Panic and hire an expensive tutor for "SAT Study Skills." Expect this tutor to teach your student everything they might have learned in the preceding decade if they had memorized their math facts and done their homework problems. Be disappointed and angry when tutor cannot do this.
Thus ends my only-slightly-satirical summary of how many American students today are "taught" math.
I remember when my kids brought their math work home. I thought, I was good in math and I even loved algebra. What my kids showed me was something surreal and frightening. It made no sense. I showed them how I would work the problem, but then said I had no idea what the teacher was teaching. It had more steps and seemed quite intensive for some simple math.
I remember using a calculator to balance my checkbook, and then one day I couldn't find it and noticed that doing the calculations took time. I was slow and my ego took a little hit from that insight. Now I just do the math on paper because I don't want to lose what I don't use.
Next goal, more handwriting letters and less time typing. And then after that....relearning and practicing Spanish. Since I am turning 50 this month, I want to exercise my mind. :-) New inputs always help.
Good for you! I always have some engineering paper with me in class and like to show my students how I can solve a problem faster/as fast as their graphing calculator in many cases. If the time they put into learning keystrokes for a graphing calculator were put into learning the actual math, they would be so much better off!
Awesome.. thank you for saying what us "old farts" have been saying right along.... Plus now Texas is trying to stop the standardized testing of the younger students... I think it is the right move... allow the teachers to teach the curriculum and not spend the entire school year, teaching to the test!!!
Good for Texas! And hooray for us old farts with our mad arithmetic skills.
Posted using Partiko Android