5/26/10

Here's the deal. . . in my last practicum I taught math almost everyday toward the end of the semester!!! It was the only subject that I was there for. This semester I am only there during writing. It would have been nice to have this class last semester so I could blog about my class and math lessons etc. So now all of my math outside of class relates to my son who will also be done with school on Wednesday. So for now I will rant about my experience with him this year. I will just say his teacher is a perfect example of how teachers ruin math for students. This year my son has excelled on following step by step directions to get to the answer of the problem. If you put it in any kind of context or word problem he's lost because there are no addition signs in a word problem. This is really probably the ultimate frustration as a parent with homework. He gets to the word problems and tries but really doesn't get it if a lot of the time. You say didn't you do this in school today and he says no. Well what did you do in school today? He writes out a math problem. The same kind of problem the word problem is trying to get him to do but there's no connection because they didn't go over word problems in class. GRRRRRR! It is very hard to convince a child that they can do good in math after they have reached a certain level of frustration.