My wife is a teacher educator. Many of her students headed for elementary schools, “hate” math and/or are “afraid of math”. When they come to her classroom that is. Not so much when they leave. She’s the math specialist in her small department (and the chair too). She changed the requirements so that those headed for middle or high school also must take “teaching elementary math”, so that if, as happens too often, the kids come to them deficient or “hating” or “afraid”, they can figure out what went wrong earlier, and fix it.
She’s only one teacher educator, in a small program. But when I think of how many kids are not exposed to a teacher in elementary school who can’t do, “hates” or “is afraid of” math because of her efforts, plus those who where her elementary students when she was in the public school classrom, the numbers get rather large. Still just a drop in the bucket, but still quite a legacy to have.
She’s only one teacher educator, in a small program. But when I think of how many kids are not exposed to a teacher in elementary school who can’t do, “hates” or “is afraid of” math because of her efforts, plus those who where her elementary students when she was in the public school classrom, the numbers get rather large. Still just a drop in the bucket, but still quite a legacy to have.
I knew a very smart Professor of Math Education who also was blessed with great common sense. As was suggested by someone else in this topic that using every day problems to teach math was a good approach. He had a whole series of labs cutting across K - 12 that were either everyday life situations that you could identify with or also riddles or puzzles that had a math basis for the solution. They tended to get and keep students attention.
However he also had something special he saved for students going into elementary education. He told them that the time in child's life when their mind is most open to math is in the elementary school age. And that sense most elementary teachers did not like math that put a special burden on them to work hard to have make sure students have the opportunity to learn math and that their fear of math did not hinder their students.
I have no idea how many he reached, but it does point out a flaw in our educational system.
For the most part this has been a very good topic and I bookmarked the utube above and also sent it to my daughter who after getting her kids into high school has become certified to teach math and has just gotten a job teaching high school math.
My father’s parents were both teachers, my other grandfather was a teacher, Mother was a teacher, and Dad taught until WWII, when he became an inspector working in a defense plant. Back in those days, teaching and nursing were the only professional fields open to women - which meant that women able to do professional grade work were essentially drafted into teaching. Which in effect subsidized education.I have two observations:
- If, like me, a child enjoyed word problems and despised number crunching, the teacher was more likely to harp on the lack of enthusiasm for number crunching than to recognize and reinforce, and strongly promote, competence in word problems. Most teachers hated the word problems themselves and didn’t elect to go into education because they were whizzes in mathematics.
- Today, with the advent of the khanacademy.orgweb site, math education can be done quite differently than traditionally.