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Aug 2019

Well, I was chatting with folks the other day about my teacher training and was hit with several things about "wait they were told to do that" and such concerning what I learned and was suggested to do as best practice. And I realized, most people don't get to ask teachers why they do things and get a straight answer when they are a student so...

Certain things I can't answer because I'm an active teacher but I'm happy to answer your questions! Please keep in mind, milage may vary as I am a US teacher.

So ask away!

braces self for questions that pushes her buttons

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There are 86 replies with an estimated read time of 22 minutes.

I don't have kids but I'm curious...

Is common core math as awful as it seems? It makes zero sense to me :dizzy_face:

As a secondary (junior high and high school) math teacher I gotta answer this one. Common core isn't terrible so much as many elementary teachers are not math savvy enough to really be teaching it effectively.
I feel like a lot of people don't really understand the math at the core well enough to teach common core in a way that would be beneficial to student. But also common core removes a lot of useful algorithms like long division, and tbh not knowing those is gonna suck in later yrs when they gotta do things like polynomial division.

deep calming breaths Sorry common core is a hot button for me. Because it's COMPLETELY misunderstood. I shall endeavor to be polite, but may head into rant territory >.< sorry

Ok first lets address what common core is. Common core is NOT how something is taught. But because it came up as the same time as new techniques, people assume it is.

Common core was written into a law where states could voluntarily sign up to a general curriculum plan that would mean a child moving from one state to another should be getting the same content as they were before they moved. Why is this an issue? Well, military brat here. In 5th grade I moved from one state to another. The first state taught multiplying fractions and decimals in 5th grade. The second in 6th. now not so bad for me... but then a friend of mine moved during the first month from where we were, to where I had used to live. When she got there she was expected to already know something she was never taught because standards are not the same state to state. Common core sought to fix this by saying "Ok, everyone please teach how to multiply fractions about wintertime in 6th grade." Some states chose not to do this (like Texas cause we stubborn), but so many states did sign on, around 43 I believe at the time, it did affect text books and how they were made.

Ok so onto what YOU are talking about. The "New Math". I would like to point out there is always a new math every generation as someone finds a clever way to teach the kids that get confused. A good teacher and a good district will teach at least 2 or 3 ways to solve a problem in order to help kids understand what's being done. The more recent methods were adopted as a best practice by most places because it introduces algebraic thinking early on, so kids struggle with it less when they get to algebra.

One thing we do try to avoid now is doing straight up memorizing of facts. teaching a kid 3 x 7 is 21 gets them the fact, but most kids didn't connect it to meaning 3 baskets with 7 apples each means there are 21 apples. So when faced with a word problem like that, kids froze up and couldn't connect the dots on what they were to do. I saw this many times as a teacher myself.

Now, there are several math techniques and I'll be happy to explain them but it might help if you narrowed it down to one you saw.

Edit: The new math stuff is what we teach here in texas despite not being common core. just FYI

Ah ok! That makes sense.

My friend tried to explain it to me and was terrified of having her child involved with it. To the point that she wants to put her youngest into private schools to avoid it

Well Private schools can be best for some kids, but she still may end up doing the new math as it's been found to help with the way kids learn and understand math. You amy want to check if your state even does common core at all! (link shows and has more details!)

http://www.corestandards.org/standards-in-your-state/

Now, concerning the math bits, I'm assuming going into Kinder, so if you want to understand the 10 square I can help tint that and even find some lovely videos for it.

Sure! I'm interested. I've never been good at math so when looking at common core I was so confused :joy:

Ok so with the starting stuff the 10 square is used to let kids put the shapes they are counting into a rack and easily count without miscounting. Very good for kinder and first graders! So if you had 15 red dots you might get something like this.

Which also makes it go faster in counting because the kids know the first rack has 10 because it's full. Then they only have to count the bottom one to check. Eventually we let them know "hey this is basically 10+5, so what is that?" You can even go "All 3 rows has five, what's a way to show that?" and the kids will be encouraged to do something like "5+5+5". They may also get asked "Hey, what are two ways they could have gotten these 15 dots?" and the kids write a few number sentences to show it. So it basically introduces the idea throughly there is more than one way to get a number in an easy to understand for the kiddos way. (saw so many 1st graders argue "no 3+4 equals 7! You can't do 5 + 2" before this.)

Subtraction can be done by having dots of one color in the box and then having say 3 black dots outside. You explain to the kids the black dots go over red ones and those are now gone, so how many are left now.

Now for the other one that normally confuses folks, the multiplication. Well... someone else already made a nice video so I encourage ou to check it out and do it along with her!

That makes way more sense then how it was explained to me :joy:

Does it make sense if someone with a Doctorate in Mathematics isn't allow to teach math b\c no teaching degree/licence?

Simple answer. Yes it does.

Longer answer will require me pulling from my experience in college with someone who became a profession for Astronomy because of his NASA background. He was a brilliant man to be sure, he knew his stuff and could valuate all sorts of things quickly, both in his head and on paper. However, as the lecture professor it was his job to explain HOW to do those things, then we went to the lab professor (different guy) who had gone to school specially to teach.

Have you ever met someone who was great at something but when they tried t show you everyone got frustrated because they couldn't explain it at all? That's what happened with our lecture professor. The only reason any of us passed is we kept asking the lab professor how to do the things we didn't get. One day he got frustrated and asked us why we weren't paying attention. We explained we WERE but the professor couldn't answer our questions in a way that made sense. We even showed our notes.

You see, just excuse someone is very intelligent does not mean they have the skills needed to explain information to others. You have to understand things like Blooms taxonomy (the basis for how to get to higher level thinking on a topic), how to teach to the various styles of learning, the different methods of doing things so you can teach ways other than your preferred method, you even need to understand some basic psychology! And this is just with average students who don't have any learning issues or anything else. And THEN there are all sorts of laws involving students and what you can and can't say, can and can't do... your rights, students rights, ect.

That certification shows you have spent time learning this and understand it well enough to be able to properly teach. Even with alternative certifications, future teachers must spend over 100 hrs just OBSERVING good and bad teachers to learn from them, do a intern ship or student teach for anywhere from 6 months to a full school year, pass tests showing you know the state's standards and education related laws. Once you know all this, you are better equipped to teach, and you have the proof.

I would also like to mention the world of education changes so FAST that in my state I'm required to complete on my own time a minimum of 150 hours of continuing education classes within a 5 year period, with certain percentages going towards things like classroom management, my curriculum, and even things like how to work with special needs students.

You make good arguments but counter argument, home school kids perform better then school kids. In other words, people who don't have a teaching degree are better at teaching than those who have been trained to teach. So I still don't understand why you need a license to teach.

When I was in high school, I was a "victim" of this. My first year of high school I went to a private school where it was something like you had 3-4 classes a day and basically half a year of school equaled one full year. So when I was a freshman, I basically took two years worth of math.

That school closed down and I transferred to the public school which had a normal school year schedule. Because my maths were messed up, in my junior year I ended up with basically an elective math class called Discrete Math. I still don't really know what that is because they had soooo much trouble finding someone to teach it. The person who usually taught it was now on maternity leave. We had maybe 5 different teachers and all except the last teacher we had were people who were engineers or the like and did not have teaching degrees. One of them even starting writing on the wall at one point (funny thing. dry erase markers don't erase from the wall lol) and another (or maybe the same guy idk) didn't know what to do when we had a fire drill (and the classroom was right next to the main entrance/exit). Every day class was just really awkward and there were only 6 of us in the class and we all still struggled with it.

It was a terrible experience because nobody understood what the class even was and none of these people knew how to teach. It also didn't help that they lasted 1-2 weeks. Then we finally got a real math teacher who was awesome, but by then I was already struggling and my straight A's in math were over from that point on.

Obviously, that could have also been the fact that we cycled through so many teachers, but it also probably didn't help that they all had no idea what they were getting into when they started since they had no experience.

And like I said, 6 kids! It's not like they even had 20+ kids to teach. Just 6 of us. :frowning:

Not a all a professional in this domain, I only did some TA work as a grad student. But I wonder if it does not have something to do with teaching to one person vs teaching to many persons. With just one (or few) you can adapt constantly depending on reactions, and build an unique, specific teaching strategy. With many people, it's not possible so it's better to know generic guidelines.

That is terrible, but that was just your experience. Statistics show non teachers teach better for some reason.

The one on one teaching would make a difference, but that doesn't explain group unschooling where kids are gathered in a classroom setting. The same teacher to student ratio but the non licenced teacher still seems to outperform.

I am glad to know that my experience was an exception to the rule! And even as much as it sucked, it still can't rival the extreme suckiness that was my high school Pre-Calculus class in my senior year. That one was really terrible and that was taught by someone who had experience teaching it, just decided to do it in a terrible way.

I never heard of pre-calculus until now. I just went straight to calculus at my high school.

@fifthpaw
Now I would like to start by stating that I firmly believe that some students thrive better in Homeschool, just as some thrive better in Public, Private or Charter. So I am not going to put down homeschooling at all but I do want to bring up some things that do affect homeschooling and it's students.

  1. Generally it's been shown over and over that lower teacher to student ratios improve student performance. This is regardless of the skill level of the teacher because you can now focus in on the individual needs.

  2. Most homeschool families follow a professionally made curriculum generally and I have had chances to look through it, a lot of it is a script that anyone can follow to explain concepts. However that said, I have personally met with folks who had to stop homeschooling their kids because the scripts got to a point where if the script did not have answers to the child's questions- the parent could not properly teach the subject.

  3. Even though it is called homeschooling, parents may hire professionals for up to a certain number of hours a week to help teach their child. They may also take part in homeschool groups where other parents teach whatever area they understand best. This means the child is not solely reliant on only one family member.

  4. Often homeschooled children are from family's that can... well... afford it. Socioeconomic advantages do throw the numbers off as a result because these are children that would have had head start that children who have no choice BUT to go to public school so the parents can work to pay their bills would never have had. Another thing that throws the numbers off is public schools can't turn anyone away at all. So students that won't preform well will most likely end up staying at a public schools r returning to them because the parent will become frustrated with homeschooling and give up (something else I have seen).

  5. The parents are grading the kids. Teachers in public schools are generally not allowed to have their own kids because we may grade easier or harder than we would normally. I'm sure it doesn't happen often, but as a child I knew some homeschool parents who did tgrade easier on their child in a situation a normal teacher would not.

Again, this is not to say that a person can't teach a child how to do something. But when you look at the entire picture for public school and the much larger variety of students they must work with over a homeschool child, where you are teaching your child who you know inside and out, it is still comparing fruit... but not the same kind. It's like complaining you can't hand squeeze an apple for juice, so it isn't as good as an orange that you can hand squeeze. You can still get juice from the apple, but there is more to it than one would think.

I apologize for the double post, but I'm assuming you are referring to charter and private here which don't HAVE to have a certified teacher? Having also worked in a charter school I can answer that too.

The school literally kicked out any kid that acted up and discouraged parents from signing up agian if their child wasn't preforming to the school's standards. Those factors along bring up the GPA by creating a calmer learning environment and getting rid of kids that preformed poorly. The charter I was at panicked when they realized they were being required to take in life skills students and provide SPED services one year because it would hurt their college acceptance rate- one of the major selling points. (BTW they had their own private college which would automatically accept almost any student we had)