Adventures of a Math Tutor

Mathematics for Home Schoolers

2009-04-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

After attending Great (math) Circles Conference at MSRI last week I got an idea that it would be interesting to find out how mathematics is taught to the home schoolers. Apparently a growing number of parents are deciding on home schooling option these days.

Experiments

2009-04-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

I decided to give each of my students a "quick quiz" - a douzen of mental math exercises which need to be done in about 10 sec each. I would like to see if their brain 'CPU' improves...

From my students...

2009-04-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

April 30, 2009
It was another quite interesting coincidence: both of my 5th graders attending different schools where under the impression that to find the area of a given figure you just need to multiply all given dimensions!

April 14, 2009
Yesterday, one of my 5th grade students came from and they were talking about Pi and Circumference at their math class. But the teacher did not explain what is center, radius, and diameter of the circle, so my student was not sure what the middle of a circle is called and if diameter is a straight or broken line.
But 'Pi' sounded really cool! (though the teacher never mentioned that it is not exactly 3.14)

Fundamentals missing...

2009-04-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

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.

Motivation...

2009-04-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

Since I started to help our family friends children with their mathematics studies in late 2003, I was repeatedly stunned, surprised, and amazed by the situation these kids find themselves in. All of our friends are highly educated high-tech professionals and most of them loved mathematics during their school years and none of them had problems with the standard math curriculum. I observed a lot of similarities in perceiving math and struggling with math, although kids are coming from different schools and various grades (I taught grades 2-12 so far).So I decided to try to start writing about my experiences, observations, and ideas related to elementary, middle, and high-school math education in Bay Area, CA.