You know, it's amazing to me sometimes to read comments about education.

[conuly]

Everybody is convinced that things were better when they grew up, and they use the most ridiculous ways to prove it. Inevitably, in some conversation about phonics, somebody who vaguely knows "phonics are better" but has no idea what that means will say that they know phonics are better because back in the 50s everybody learned from Dick and Jane and nobody of that age is illiterate today! And when talking about math, every single time, a dozen people will falsely proclaim that nobody was poor at math back when they or their grandparents grew up (whenever that was!) and that THEY certainly learned the traditional way - like everybody did up until ten years ago! (Some people never heard of New Math?)

Today I read one that made me roll my eyes. This kid was given two numbers - say 13 and 22 - and told to estimate the answer. She added the numbers, got 35, and was predictably marked wrong. This infuriated her father, as he commented, because "schools are just teaching kids what they'll never use instead of what they need to know!!"

I would've marked that one wrong too! She didn't do what was asked, which is round each number and THEN add. And I don't know about him, but I use estimation all the time. I certainly don't add up every single penny as I shop, I go to the nearest quarter. And I always find a reasonable range before adding (though if its only two numbers I do it without thinking) so that if I get a VERY wrong number I can tell before I check! But it's something about asking kids to estimate (never mind that, if my education was typical, most parents of my generation were formally taught to do that too) that seems to irritate people. People get irritated about lattice multiplication, but they get incensed about estimating and rounding. I just don't get it!

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"I read it that Uly's mum realised she had calculated volume, and recalculated as surface area to get the answer right. The other students didn't have that reality check and blithely wrote down the volume, getting it wrong."

You may be right - I've read the sentence over several times, and can't tell which is meant. It seems more plausible to me that some teacher would spring a deliberately-ambiguous trick question than that a whole classful of students would believe it takes thousands of gallons of paint to paint a single room. Thousands of gallons, sheesh! had none of them ever painted anything, or even ever seen anything being painted?

It really points up the truth of John Holt's How Children Fail, because in order to come up with such an answer, they must have totally disconnected 'math' from 'reality' in their minds: it didn't matter that the answer didn't make sense, because they didn't expect it to; didn't even look to see whether it did or not. Except Connie's mother, who apparently did expect her answer to make sense in the real world of real paint.

I hope your reading of the sentence is the correct one, because it would really bite if a child who got a wrong answer and then corrected it was told that the wrong answer was "right" after all. That kind of thing was all too common back in the 60's - trick questions were supposed to "make children think"; they'd even pull crap like putting contradictory instructions on the third page of a test so one always had to read the entire test before starting on it.

[conuly]

That is what I meant, actually, though it is entirely possible the question was also badly written. I've never seen a copy of the test in question. I'm sorry it took so long to reply, but our routine visit to the orthodontist yesterday turned into an emergency visit to our normal dentist.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I'm sorry to hear; that sounds awful - hope everything is okay now.

[conuly]

It's actually good, because Eva turned out to have a huge abcess which wasn't going to clear up on its own, so best that we know about it, but I had been planning to head to the beach! All week, things just keep coming up!