Britain has imported math teachers from high-scoring Shanghai to demonstrate teaching techniques, reports The Guardian....
McMullen spent two weeks observing at a Shanghai primary school in September. Math lessons are shorter there, but better, he says. “I saw better maths teaching in 35 minutes than I had ever done in an hour and ten minutes.”
In Shanghai every child of the same age is on the same page of the same text book at the same time.
. . . Children have mastered their jiujiu (times tables) back to front and inside out by the time they are eight. Classrooms are bare and text books are basic, minimal, “not that appealing” to look at, admits McMullen, but of exceptionally high quality and thoroughly researched.
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Mastering Math Teaching
As this post shows, it's not "drill and kill" but "drill and skill":
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like excellent technique. State an algorithm which does not bear any relation to anything concrete, ask a question, get one answer, and then have everyone else repeat it in unison. Perhaps in China and North Korea…but I believe that students should actually understand what they're doing, and then practice it on problems of increasingly more difficult level and need for creativity ...
I guess that's one way of seeing it.
ReplyDeleteThere was a time in our history when our schools were the same way. No bells, no buzzers, just books and learning. We memorized times tables in third grade, learned handwriting and read stories using such methods as SRA. What a difference fifty years makes and not necessarily for the better.
ReplyDeleteEllen K -- memorizing times tables is in a different category. You do it, because it makes the rest of your math life easier, and multiplication is a shortcut, anyway … the whole point of it is to sea time, and if you have to grab your calculator, it completely defeats the purpose.
ReplyDelete