@dataandcolours6284

1 year ago

Being enthusiastic about mathematical didactics and being involved in both teaching and the construction of math books for the elementary school I am completely in love with the quote at 10;44 in this video! It is bang on the money. The arguably biggest hurdle to get student to become decent or good in mathematics is to first make them understand that mathematics is absolutely not about the answer in the first place. This problem seem to be especially big in countries that do a lot of multiple choice questions with little or no demand on the student showing HOW and WHAT the student did to come to the conclusions it did, even at ages up to 18 years old! It's crazy! The SAT in the USA is arguably one of the worst possible examples of this. The way those test are constructed it is actually barely a test in mathematics at its core but mostly instead about data extraction, pure algebra and eliminating obviously incorrect alternatives. Mathematics is arguably more in the realm of a philosophical subject on the art of problem solving and logically sort your thoughts and ideas and clearly communicating the ideas and solutions to others by using logic, pure text, illustrations and mathematical symbols. Skills that are extremely important to develop and nourish for a wide variety of reasons! Anyone that says things like "In mathematics you are either right or wrong" may actually never have engaged in actual mathematics but appear to confuse mathematics with only being the related subtopics of arithmetic and algebra. But also in a way that seems like they were never required to properly communicate their solution for some reason, but instead incentivized to memorize various recipes and "hacks" without any deeper understanding of the underlying concepts. This is why almost all of these short "educational" videos on Instagram and Tiktok is an absolute cancer for mathematics as they perpetuate those misconceptions to the absurd. Even as early as pre-teen age, students should gradually be required to properly communicate what their thought process was on the way to the answer and learn how to convince the reader (or listener) that their arguments holds. Those skills are actually even helpful for pure verbal argumentations even when mathematics are not apparently involved at all. The trend of trying to make most test electronic and self-corrected is a big hurdle in this regard and has absolutely not helped. The amount of things you need to just outright remember in mathematics is actually very limited compared to other subjects and recipes and "hacks" should be avoided at all costs unless you can be very sure that the required more basic concepts motivating why they work are present. Also presented solutions that makes jumps that cannot be deciphered without assuming some "hack" must always lead to a significantly reduced score (maybe even 0 points) on that particular question, despite having the right answer as they have not communicated what they did and why it worked. But unfortunately there is a lot if inertia in Mathematics and many teachers and parents still being far too obsessed about having their students/children arriving at the "correct" answer without appreciating the importance on what path was taken to get there. Lastly it is of outmost importance to welcome alternative ways of arriving to an answer and always give full score for any path to the solution that is logically robust and reasonable to follow, regardless of how unorthodox it was, unless it was explicitly stated in the test that such kind of solution was not allowed. That often creates joy and even pride among some student if they managed figure out their own way to a solution and being rewarded for it (if it was indeed a correct path of arguments) and makes student feel like mathematics is a more free subject and not a matter of memorizing procedures someone have decided are the best. One of the worst thing you can do is to put a certain type of solution for a problem on a pedestal unless there is very good reasons to do that. The myth of "there is always a best solution" is highly detrimental and needs to be annihilated as it is often not the case and it contributes to student feeling forced to solve problems in a certain way that may not correspond to their preferred way of reasoning.

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