Mending math classes
According to Dan Meyer, math needs to be taught differently. Today the textbooks give way too much information in the word problems, so you don’t have to be good at math to solve them, you just need to understand a textbook. What Dan suggests for school’s teaching techniques is to give less extra information to the problems and let the children think them through. He concludes that reasoning and patient problem solving are how we should teach children math in school.
Quote
Dan Meyer said in his prolonged TEDtm talk that, “the math serves the conversation, the conversation doesn’t serve the math.” He said this because he found most teachers give too many details into the questions and don’t allow the children to take time to talk about the question and think it through.
Paraphrase
Dan Meyer suggests that math textbooks and teachers should teach patient problem solving. When now, at school where we learn, the textbooks and teachers give all the tiny details that don’t get thrown at you in real life.
