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<p>I read an article that claimed that elementary-school teachers in general seem to be relatively poor at math. The difference in middle-class schools is that the parents have a greater ability to supplement the curriculum.</p>
<p>Parents in our area supplement the curriculum in both reading and math as necessary. Immigrant parents tend to send their children to after-school programs.</p>
<p>Even (or especially?) parents of special education students who theoretically have all sorts of entitlements often find themselves supplementing the school curriculum with private therapies even as they advocate on behalf of their students. And of course these days our students also have access to supplementary instruction via the Internet. </p>
<p>That is one huge reason why it is difficult to compare schools and teachers. And we haven’t even begun to look at peer influence…</p>
<p>People tend to assume they’re bad at math because they’re not quickly and naturally talented. But math is about PRACTICE. So deciding that you’re bad at it without putting in the work is pointless. It’s like being good at the piano. Some kids are the exceptions and pick it up immediately, but everyone else has to put hours and hours of practice in. If you don’t practice, you’re not BAD at piano, you just haven’t done any of the work. Same with math.</p>
<p>For example, I personally never practiced my math. Therefore, I have developed very few math skills. </p>
<p>Yep. There are a lot of psychological hangups at work. Yes, there are some natural limitations, but people who are smart generally can both do well in math and write well if they have the desire for it.</p>
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<p>That could be true in some cases. . But my kids, very good at both math and reading, seemed to have an inborn affinity for both . Evidently DD’s teacher didn’t heap on enough extra math work because in the early school years DD used to beg us for math problems (especially mixture problems) at bedtime. </p>
<p>One of our favorite family stories is about the evening when DH and I came home to find DD and DS helping the babysitter with her math homework. </p>
<p>@colorado_mom: That is a cute story!</p>
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<p>And got A’s but she didn’t think she knew what’s going on 
Don’t ask me.</p>
<p>HS math does not require any talent whatsoever. Even math that taught as remedial courses at colleges (because k -12 is totally lacking in college preparation) is still very elementary. I agree that everybody has been brain-washed by bad teachers that only brainiaks can even attempt to understand the math concepts. Math is nothing but a universal language of science. As such, math is nowhere near in complexity as just a language that we speak, use for writing and reading. Yes, English or any other language require much more complex brain activity than math, if, of course nobody is building any psycho barriers for learning it simply because instructors are not capable of teaching it. There is NO other reason exist for not being good at math. </p>
<p>Well, this just came out: <a href=“Why Do Americans Stink at Math? - The New York Times”>Why Do Americans Stink at Math? - The New York Times;
<p>Summary of its claims: every decade or few, new methods of teaching math are promoted, but there is not enough teaching of the teachers to teach the new methods effectively, eventually causing a reversion to less effective methods of teaching math that the existing teachers are accustomed to.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus, interesting article. It brings to mind a study I heard about from NPR some months ago, where researchers gave a too-difficult problem to school kids in the US and in Japan. If I recall, the Japanese kids worked hard trying figure out how to solve the problem for close to an hour. The US kids declared after about 5 minutes that they couldn’t do the problem because they hadn’t been shown how.</p>
<p>So part of the problem with US math education is that kids aren’t expected or expecting to think. They are expected to get the right answer and they are expecting to be shown a series of steps to get the right answer for each type of problem they are required to do. </p>
<p>Some of the examples cited do seem rather ridiculous to me. How much training does a teacher require to teach multiplication using rectangular arrays? Isn’t that obvious? I’m sure I showed my kids that without even giving it a thought. A lot of these basic math concepts can be easily understood by kids with manipulative object such as those used in Montessori classrooms. There is no great mystery here. If the lessons are so complicated the teachers can’t understand how to teach them, then I’d say the instructional material is just bad. And, yes, I’ve seen lessons that are supposed to teach understanding which left my kid who already understood the material completely bewildered.</p>
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Unfortunately, this seems to extend right into the college classroom. After doing many different types of physics problems, and seeing the general means by which to approach them, students will still complain that the problems on the exam were not the same ones done for homework or in class. </p>
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<p>I called them handing out recipes. That happened to my kid with a negative effect. We taught her how to read time on an analog clock with hands when she was 6. You go to bed at 9 o’clock when the hands are…etc. Once she grasped the concept relating the moving hands to flowing time, she could read everything including all the tricky ones, 11:59, 5:25,… As it so happened, her school started teaching it a few days later by deviding the clock by four, quarter of, quarter after. My kid’s small brain couldn’t reconcile the two different concepts; how do you divide the time into four, time is not static that you hold in one place and cut into four piece. She refused to read time for a long time after that.</p>
<p>^ Something similar here. Our DD2 was upset she was marked down because the math question was estimate the sum of two numbers. She was capable of doing the math in her head so she put the accurate answer. She was miffed.</p>
<p>The teaching methods used are what enables the majority of students to learn to answer the questions they are being asked. They certainly aren’t aimed at “the students who do not need much … teaching” as asserted by Xiggi.</p>
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I don’t think learning to answer “the questions they are being asked” is all that useful, if that is all they can do. What happens when you ask another question? What happens when they get asked a question in the real world? (OMG, I was never taught that question in school go ask someone else.) I’ve seen enough “I’m out, I have no knowledge of this” answers to know what happens there. Unfortunately, many students (and many of their parents, even on CC) have the attitude that the student should be “taught” to answer the questions on the exam.</p>
<p>I’m not defending it, just giving my observations. Most kids are afraid of “word problems” because they have to think a little about how to solve the problem presented rather than going through the rote manipulations they learned through endless repetition of essentially identical problems to solve some equation. If a US teacher tried to teach in the Japanese style described in the article, they’d probably be flooded with complaints from parents that Johnny doesn’t know how to do the work because the teacher didn’t teach him how. If you set a group of US kids to figure out something as a group, most of them will sit back and wait for the “smart” kid to figure it out for them. That is how group work happens in our school and I see complaints from kids on here that it happens to them in their schools as well. You need kids who are motivated and really want to learn and understand to use that approach. Teachers have to work with what walks in their door.</p>
<p>“Teachers have to work with what walks in their door.”</p>
<p>I would add, within the curriculum and materials they are allowed to use. Many teachers, I see in my school system, have their hands tied. Their course schedules are dictated by the school system and doesn’t allow much leeway for the teachers either. So you now have unmotivated teachers teaching unmotivated students.</p>