This is the start of the list of fundamental concepts which (according to my information) are not taught properly in schools.
1. Order of operations.
In Spring 2008 I observed a few math lessons on order of operations given for the 6th graders. Only one teacher presented material clearly with no mistakes! Other ones never mentioned that multiplication and division, and addition and subtraction are done from left to right. One teacher managed to explain it in such a way that I started to feel dizzy and was not sure if I really know myself what it is.
Now it is Spring of 2009 and my own daughter ia attending the 6th grade... and again they are reviewing the order of operations... And their teacher (which is supposed to be a pretty strong one) does not know that addition and subtraction are the same level operations as well as multiplication and division - he does always multiplication before division and addition before subtraction! When a couple of kids from his class pointed to him that this was not the case - to his credit he decided to check on this and came back next day with the acknowledgement that he was wrong.
It would be interesting to see how many kids can do
3 - 3 + 3 or 3 : 3 x 3 correctly!
2. Division by zero.
At least 50% of the middle-schools students do not know that you are not allowed to divide by zero. They never hear it from the teachers.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment