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Pam
Posts:
1,471
Registered:
12/6/04
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Re: As goes reading education, so goes math education
Posted:
Jun 4, 2010 10:43 AM
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> "The "smart" kids are the ones who are done
> first, the "stupid" kids are "slow". It is such the
> wrong message."
>
>
> What would you propose doing? Elementary school is
> tough because there is so little tracking, and I am
> not suggesting that there be. But by third grade, the
> gap seems to start and I am talking in the same class
> with the same teacher. I suppose that you can give
> the faster kids more difficult work but then you can
> run into a problem with going through the layers too
> fast. And it is hard to advance them too much in
> elementary school because of other practical issues.
Ah, we start to see the problem. Robert swallowed whole the lesson of elementary school, fast = smart. And blow me over with a feather, apparently good mathematics is mathematics that is done fast. Silly me, I always thought it was something different.
Let me try to put it in terms he will understand. One of my sons was quite proficient in arithmetic. In 3rd grade, while being evaluated for some language/auditory processing issues, he scored in the 99th percentile in both math computation and math reasoning. When the teacher gave the students free time to do something quietly at their desks, my son made up long division problems for himself. This was almost two years before long division was "taught" in school (Trailblazers), but had little to do with me - he asked, I showed him, and that was that.
My son is THE most laid-back person I have ever met, quiet, calm, patient, nothing ever bothers him, and he is never in a hurry. The kind of kid who could sit in a field watching a caterpillar gnaw through leaves for hours on end (no surprise he is now a double major in wildlife biology and photography). Whatever he does is done slowly and carefully. During the 3rd grade testing, they evaluated his response speed and it was at a KG level, but his accuracy was at an 8th grade level. So you get the picture. When he had a math worksheet to do, he was slow not because he was struggling but because he might stop to notice an interesting pattern the numbers made, or often because he was asking himself why questions (really interesting ones sometimes - I am not often caught off guard by why questions because I have asked them myself, but he would find those that I had previously simply taken for granted). His friend, fast but quite inaccurate, rarely missed recess, my son often did.
Sure, it is a problem for elementary teachers, but there are ways to handle it that don't reward speed over a job well done.
Pam
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