Still thinking about my new tutoring effort. A few years ago I was doing some substitute teaching in the Fort Wayne Community Schools system and ended up teaching math to special ed students at a high school. The students were fine and I understood the material, even though I hadn't worked with algebra for several years. It was obvious that most of the students were really struggling with the equations, though, and I found myself wondering why these students weren't being taught basic math skills; addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. I asked another teacher, at the end of the day, why these students were expected to learn algebra? Her answer - it's what's required by state and federal guidelines.
Last week I took some tutor training for a program we run on Mondays after school at our church. We do one on one tutoring for an hour with third through fifth graders who are struggling with reading and/or math. The speaker who led us through ideas to be used to reinforce their math skills (and they were good ideas) stressed that she thinks it's very important that students learn the basics, specifically the multiplication tables. I asked her if the multiplication tables were printed in the students' math books, remembering the pages of tables we always had at the back of our books when I was in elementary school. That's how I remember learning math facts, by reading and memorising and being able to see how the sequences went together. Her answer was "Well, no, there are no tables in the back of the books. We just use flash cards." I'm glad they are stressing basic math facts again, but really, would it be so bad to give them some reference material? or would that, like a calculator, be 'cheating'?
No comments:
Post a Comment