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 @DavidKButlerUoA
Trouble is, you can't just correct course once, and expect everything to proceed smoothly thereafter. You've got to stay the course -- which typically means sticking with the kids you're trying to help for years on end. It's a huge investment. But it's been worth every minute.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps
Luckily I plan to stick with my daughter for as long as she’ll have me.
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She's incredibly lucky to have you. So few parents know anything at all about math, and are themselves traumatized and cowed. You are in a position to make a huge difference in her life, and that's a tremendous piece of good fortune for you both. But it's a big project.
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