No we don’t.
I mean, go ahead and lie about how I spent 6 years of my own life to my face. Memorizing proofs and working endless assignments of just…equations. Here is an equation. Do thing to it. Solve it, simplify it, factor it, graph it. I plugged and chugged so many numbers into the quadratic equation, I don’t think I was ever told what that’s for. Some chapters had token word problems.
A lot of the math I actually know I learned in physics class, where you’d do unit math. That 25 meters traveled in 5 seconds means a velocity of 5 meters/second. Science class math comes with sniff tests that math class math doesn’t.
The way I was introduced to order of operations was, the teacher wrote a long expression on the board, this plus that divided by such minus thus times such plus this times that. Spend a second solving this. Okay, who got 7? Who got -23? If you got -23, you’re right.
That is FUCKGARBAGE teaching. It may be the flight instructor in me, that my classroom is an actual airplane that we fly over actual people and their homes, but few things piss me off as deeply as setting up your students to fail. Because introducing the subject this way separates your class into two groups: Those that already have a functioning understanding of the topic whose time is being wasted, and those who don’t already understand it and need you to teach them this skill, who now feel tricked, confused and frustrated.
This teacher went on to explain Order of Operations as a series of rules you follow because following rules is what you do. “You do parenthesis before exponents before multiplication/division before addition/subtraction.” PEMDAS, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. This was taught with the same “This is how nature is” attitude as the planets of the solar system or how ionic bonds work, except algebraic notation is artificial. It’s manmade, like the English language. It’s a method of communicating ideas, except it was taught as a series of rules and procedures that you were supposed to memorize how to do without understanding the goal, and fuck your life if you lacked the vocabulary to describe what about it you didn’t understand.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
there’s more of the country than florida
SmartmanApps@programming.dev 2 hours ago
And there’s more of the country falling behind the rest of the world in Maths than just Florida. It was all over the news, again, just a few weeks ago.