Like tuna noodle casserole and Cary Grant, math and your humble blog author just don’t seem to go together. Oh, we get along, grudgingly; but if invited to a dinner party, math and I will keep a cool distance from each other. Take your binomials and your complex numbers, take your trigonometry and your theorems. I’ll keep my Gustave Flaubert and my adjective clauses.
The trouble started early with multiplication and only got worse from there. A lot worse. And some might argue that it continues today. I’d rather create a complex Word document with three appendices and an index than have to click on the Excel icon (my apologies to Daniel Bricklin and Bob Frankston, Mitch Kapor, and Bill Gates, http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html).
Once I couldn’t reliably answer 8 x 9, the curtain on mathematical mastery and computation skill was drawn closed for me. And I am sure I am not alone. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if math teachers reading this blog post were nodding their heads, thinking about the many students they know who suffer from the same roadblock.
Math is a subject forever built upon layers of knowledge previously mastered. There’s no subtraction without first learning addition, no calculus without first mastering trigonometry (and I had to look that up).
Not knowing a whole lot about teaching math but being naturally inquisitive, I am very curious to know how practicing teachers feel about today’s math curricula. Does your math material meet your expectations? What methods have worked best for you? Do you incorporate much “math in the real world” into your lessons? Is there something else you wish you could offer, especially to learners who may be struggling?
Share your math successes (and failures) with the rest of the world. There’s safety in numbers!