Parent, "teacher you are an idiot the answer is -6"
Teacher, "nope, you put a 4 instead of 2"
Parent, "Why are you teaching my kids differently than I learned"
Teacher, "the worksheets are free and I am a teacher so I can change the order of PEMDAS if I want to."
Parent, "PEMDAS isn't really something you can change. Gifted is 70%? These days kids must be dumb"
Teacher, "The kids whose homework you can't do?"
Parent, "uhmmm, I mean you are stupid"
Teacher, "Many test these days are adaptive. Designed for students to get harder questions until they get them wrong. 70% is good, 90% is really good, gifted in fact"
Parent, "You know what is wrong, your face. Was this test adaptive? "
Teacher, "but the worksheets are free. To be honest I don't know how to do this math either. I am making it up as I go"
Parent, "well, that is good I guess. If this test was or wasn't adaptive why is my daughter gifted?"
Teacher, "You live in Magna"
Mostly just joking around because I see what you are saying. I have a tough time helping my third grader with his math sometimes. The idea is to teach the kids to problem solve. Math might not be the best way to do that, but….
I have a friend that works for Adobe as a math nerd. His job is to deal with algorithms. He said they are having a really hard time finding good people to work in that department because many internet based algorithms are sort of self evolving. The old school way of math doesn't keep up. The world is changing. Some companies even purposely look for successful students with dyslexia because they can solve the problem using their own set of rules.
Maybe they should teach them the old way of math and then have a 1/2 hour of creative problem solving or something. Teachers teach what they are required to teach by law. Laws made by legislators that have never been in the classroom.
Not every teacher is amazing, but not all of them are idiots. Mr. Hamburger or whatever his name is might be an idiot I don't know. He might be trying to teach a style of math he himself doesn't understand. He learned the way we did, and like us he is having a hard time. That would definitely cause problems.
We might find out in a couple years that this type of math is the worst and that all kids that went through it can't survive in the work place. We might find that it is the best and that it is a good thing we did it. We might find that people are smart and will adapt anyway so it doesn't matter. Preparing kids for the future as parents and teachers is a tough assignment because we don't know exactly what that looks like. My dad thought it was crazy that I took a computer class. In fact, in high school I had an english teacher tell me the internet was a fad
. I guess she had never been on RME.
