Have you seen the new research about how teaching young kids just arithmetic turns them off of math, and that they can actually grasp higher order concepts in elementary school if they are taught as games?

I had this argument with my father (an engineer) all the time. He'd show me a "better" way to do it, but it wasn't the way we were SUPPOSED to do it, so I'd get in trouble.

Meh, this shit happens all the time. Last parent-teacher conf I sat through, the teacher had no idea what my background was (why don't they ask?), didn't know about the famous fiction-writing program, and after taking me through a lot of moronic baloney about other stuff, she sat there scolding my daughter for not…

I have the pdf. There were around 1000 students studied each year (867, 1127, 1017). Methodology seems legit

MISANDRY!!!

My partner's stepsister is an almost six foot tall, pretty blonde woman who did cheerleading in high school and graduated with above a 4.0 because she took college classes, (as the story goes I don't know the specifics of how she got such high grades except she worked herself into the ground to do it) and then when on…

1. Math is not subjective. It's hard to fuck up grading math.

Lol, because it's showing a sexist society. And we CERTAINLY don't live in that. Let's deny every proof, even a quantitative analysis of the fact because it doesn't fit Akalouse's world view. The math was probably wrong anyway, if a girl did it.

i think he's confusing an internet blog post with the actual journal article.

I need to verify it again, but I'm pretty sure it's in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" I just remember being blown away by how much these experiences can happen even in situations where people are clearly experts.

I suspect you are right. The stereotype is that boys are smart but careless and/or lazy and girls are careful and methodical, so I can see that leading to overscoring for the boys and underscoring for the girls when partial credit is involved.

I'm going to keep repeating this because it's a perfect example: Richard Feynman told a story of a math teacher telling Feynman that HE was wrong on a math teaching thing when it came to Feynman's daughter.

Wait, did you click through to the study and pay the $5 for access to the journal it was published in?

I'm not willing to do that for the sake of investigating something I don't care about, but I can't blame them for not being absolutely free (they gotta fund stuff).

Did you ever get dinged on quizzes and homework for not showing every step of your work? I'm thinking boys get a lot less of that. They're so smart they *just know* it.

I graded for my mother sometimes when she taught physics/chemistry and unless you want to fail 50+% of your students you need to award points for attempting problems and methodology on math problems.

Sometimes in math class we arrive at the right answer but used the wrong method. Or we take a short-cut. Points are sometimes deducted for this. If girls are singled out, that's a problelm.

They probably are. A lot of teachers I know will give a higher grade if they "know what the kid meant," even if they didn't actually give the correct answer. So if they were expected to show their work but only showed most of the steps, a biased teacher might give full credit anyway.

Even then, let's say you have a kid doing a polynomial in pre-alg. Let's say they fuck up partway on a constant but they generally get all of the logic right, still arriving at a "wrong" answer using the "right" methodology. That's where subjectivity comes into play. Unless you're the math teacher from hell, you are…

"sixth grade through the end of high school" covers a pretty wide range of math in most countries all the way through algebra and even sometimes multivariable calc. It's not that hard to imagine subjectivity in geometry or trig, either.

First: grading math at any level higher than simple arithmetic is not always objective. How do you grade partial credit for an algebra or calculus problem that maybe gets partway and stops? At that point, you're giving credit for the thinking, rather than the answer.