In article <fusla6020l8@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Banty says...
>
>In article <jfl31417fve8ml5eocirv8fa2pqa84qehs@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Bob LeChevalier
says...
>>
>>Beliavsky <beliavsky@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/science/25math.html
>>>Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices
>>>By Kenneth Chang
>>>New York Times, April 25, 2008
>>>
>>>'One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour
>>>toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling
>>>on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400
>>>miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?
>>>
>>>Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many
>>>educators in recent years have incor****ated more and more examples
>>>from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that
>>>making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.
>>
>>Actually, that isn't the idea that I've seen. The idea is that making
>>math more relevant makes kids more willing to learn, and provides at
>>least some hope that they'll have some use for the math once they walk
>>away from the classroom.
>
>From my physics and engineering training, math is exactly *about*
describing the
>real world. Indeed, aspects of the real world can only be approached
>mathematically (relativity, quantum physics).
>
>So the idea of not invoking the real world in teaching mathematics makes
>absolutely no sense.
>
>I haven't read the article, but I suspect it's not invoking real world
examples
>that have hobbled math education. Rather, it's the reliance on
expressing math
>oin *verbal* terms in the kind of examples that elementary schools have
favored
>lately (see many threads in misc.kids about that).
I just read the article. I don't know if it's more in the headlining, or
the
usual news media oversimplification int his article, but from this study
teachers would *not* be "scapping" balls and slices. (Or trains, as in
the
first paragraph.) Balls and trains have been discussed in elementary
phsyics
and algebra forever.
From the article:
________________________
In the experiment, the college students learned a simple but unfamiliar
mathematical system, essentially a set of rules. Some learned the system
through
purely abstract symbols, and others learned it through concrete examples
like
combining liquids in measuring cups and tennis balls in a container.
________________________
This is about the learning-by-doing active learning model, not about
relating
real-world concrete examples to mathematics. Learning *through* pouring
stuff
and counting stuff, rather than having the abstract *related to* volumes,
speeds, etc.
And, yes, I'm not surprised it doesn't work well for mathematics.
Kids need to learn the abstraction (it *is* abstractions after all) AND
have the
world world application. But the abstract representation is basic.
Banty
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