6. C says she doesn’t know how to read her textbook. She was surprised when I told her the book usually has explanations nearby to the exercises and answers in the back to check. She wondered why her teacher didn’t tell them this information.
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7. C says the teacher just writes the formula and that’s all they have, but the formula doesn’t mean anything to her. In particular for triangles she didn’t have any idea what the “base” and “height” were so the area formula was meaningless.
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8. Their actual assignment asked them to draw a garden with rectangular and triangular features and find the area and perimeter of each. Her triangles were all equilateral. The teacher’s only examples were right-angled. No-one helping her seems to have noticed this mismatch.
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9. Even for right-angled triangles, there was no indication in the teacher’s examples of how to find the length of the longest side, which you need for perimeter. The idea that you could draw it and measure wasn’t discussed.
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10. And then even when we did this at home, that meant decimal lengths, which have no examples in their work so far. It’s all been whole numbers. So basically allowing C to use triangles made the assignment multiple layers harder.
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11. Of course, I was only able to find this out after several hours of work, mostly consisting of me helping C to calm down enough to even consider discussing it. /end
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Replying to @DavidKButlerUoA
Thank you very much for sharing this deeply illuminating and extremely painful story. I cannot tell you how I grieve for your daughter, and how agonizing I find her predicament. I have spent almost 20 years trying to fix problems like this. I doubt there's any general solution.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps
Yeah. My actual job is helping people at University many of whom have been through this. I never thought my daughter would be one of them.
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Replying to @DavidKButlerUoA
Remediation is so much harder, though, and so much less effective, than prevention, as I'm sure you know. Over the years I have focused my efforts earlier and earlier in the development of kids and their mathophobia, because stepping in later is so much harder.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps
I can’t control what happens to my students before they come to me. That’s not my job. My job is to help the students I have.
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I understand. And I'm trying to acknowledge that your job is intrinsically extremely hard. I've had the freedom to pick my problems, so I've pitched in where I thought I could do the most good. But everyone needs help, and I applaud your efforts, which are unquestionably noble.
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