Thursday, July 18, 2013

Making the Teaching of Math Work

I don't teach math.  The last math class I had was my freshman pre-calc class in college that fulfilled all of my math requirements.  I never had the urge to study it, so I just stayed with my humanities classes.  Many people that study math tend to run away from teaching it.  I salute those that teach the subject because I know that geometry is not everyone's favorite thing to do.  I came across an interesting article on Edutopia about how colleges need to change the approach to the teaching of math.  The idea is to make relevant to students again.

This is just one of many interesting points made in the article and this is coming from an English guy:
Math teachers in the U.S. have the world's hardest job, because opinions about the subject are already stacked against it. Over the years, the humanness and relevancy of math have been squeezed out, and students no longer see its significance. To get students engaged in math again, we have to add the human element back.
That is at times the way that I feel about trying to teach grammar.   The article has many good ideas and I found that the idea of teaching math poorly is one of the main drivers preventing people from getting into STEM fields.

No comments:

Post a Comment