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Comment by allegory | Hacker News Reader

I really don't like commenting on these threads but I had to bite here.

I call bullshit on this. 18 months of maths is a completely vacuous measure of anything and this is pandering to teachers getting even more lazy and dependent on technology as a magic bullet.

As a parent in the UK with three children at school, I can safely say that the problem is that mathematics teaching is just totally shit. The methods are totally ineffective and the fundamentals just aren't taught. It's about teaching the mechanics of passing tests, particularly at primary level which is about the SATs and nothing else. That's why this seems like such a wonderful headline and the BBC sensationalises it.

Teachers buy in every technical measure and scheme that avoids introspection and looking at the real problem.

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Have you read the study?

https://onebillion.org.uk/downloads/unlocking-talent-final-r...

Would be interested to hear your comments on what you think is wrong with the methodology and conclusion?

I'll read this today in detail and reply later.

I've read similar studies before (I'm on the chair of governers for a school) and will approach with an open mind.

With that kind of thinking you might like the site/book at betterexplained.com.

Yes I do indeed like that site and have purchased the ebook already!

I have actually self-taught my oldest two their entire mathematical knowledge outside of school (bar that, physics and software engineering, I know little else) and they've done wonderfully compared to their peers because they understand the meaning and not just the method. That's the real tragedy of the education system here.

That sounds great. Did you teach them mostly what's on better explained?

Also I wonder how would math studies look if we teach people the intuition, a bit of the formalism and lot of how to use numeric and symbolic tools - instead endless rote learning.

No. I actually went through the book "Mathematics, from the birth of Numbers" by Jan Gullberg (and Mathemtics for the practical man) and extracted material and wrote my own course. This was all done before betterexplained was brought to my attention. This was trialled against my children and a couple of colleagues who were interested.

I've retrospectively applied some of the ideas on betterexplained to this rather than apply it directly as it's not really suitable for people so young and without some foundation. You can't just pick up that book and apply it without some formal knowledge.

I've been meaning to write the whole thing up as it's about 150 pages of hand written material at the moment. Time rarely allows for such things.

One of the key things I concentrate on is not teaching arithmetic but the relationships between values and the basic rules such as the commutative, distributive and associative laws (which whilst are important in arithmetic aren't understood thoroughly without abstract concepts first). The values themselves are only of consequence once you've worked out the relations. Basically it starts with algebra.

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