Heart of the City by Steenz for September 14, 2015

oh, the pressure

Wow, if she can’t understand third or fourth grade math, she has some real problems! Math doesn’t really get to be difficult until 9th grade algebra. Even then, a decent teacher can make it understood to a reasonably intelligent child. The hard part is finding a decent algebra teacher in the public schools.

Our 8th graders get algebra and intros to calc and trig. I went to same school system. If they did that when I was coming up, I think I’d still be in school :{

I had teachers in third and fourth classes who were afraid of math and taught multiplication, division, etc as exercises in memorization. To them math was a black box that just worked, but what it actually said went totally past them. In sixth grade a teacher who was appalled by what those others had created explained a lot of it in a very short time just by using graph paper. Visualizing the meanings makes it transparent. Sadly, the problem continues. I have shown kids i’ve known how to visualize multiplication on graph papers in two successive generations so far.

Agreed Phoebe.

i know just how she feels

Math? No thanks.