There are educational gurus out there promoting the idea that by giving students multiple solution paths it will give them a deeper understanding of math.\u00a0 Generally these experts know this from teaching pre-service teachers in college, some of whom come to have some insights by learning multiple paths to the same goal.\u00a0 Sorry folks.\u00a0 What works for pre-service teachers in college, does not [and never will] apply to most children.<\/p>\n
True, there are multiple ways to solve most arithmetic problems.\u00a0 They have been discovered over centuries across multiple civilizations.\u00a0 While one might dream of knowing all the ways to do long division, it’s far better to have one reliable method learned than to simply be confused and to get lost each time.\u00a0 Just as in directions to go someplace, it is hard to remember all the steps in the directions.\u00a0 When you’re new to a destination, the lefts and the rights are all arbitrary.\u00a0 If you get two or more sets of directions, you are going to mix the steps from one way with the steps from the other method and you will not arrive at your destination.<\/p>\n
In real life, as in math, once you learn one reliable method of getting to your destination, you are then free to learn additional ways, or to try short cuts.\u00a0 But please don’t confuse a beginning<\/strong> learner with short cuts or alternative methods.\u00a0 It adds to the memory load and there are additional things to think about when trying alternatives.\u00a0 Before the learner is solid in one method, the new information is likely going to get mixed up with the not-yet-learned material, leading to missteps and getting lost. Teach the long way every time and leave them to finding the short cuts on their own time.<\/p>\n But teachers say, “I want them to have a holistic understanding of what they are doing!”\u00a0 Which is laudable, but that understanding has to come AFTER a reliable set of procedures is mastered.\u00a0 There’s no reason that additional learning can’t be added to the student’s knowledge base, but it can’t come before or in place of learning a simple, basic, reliable procedure.\u00a0 \u00a0These admirable goals of getting a deeper understanding of math are fine, but they require MORE teaching than what used to be done, back when we were only taught algorithms for arithmetic.\u00a0 There is time to learn more than the algorithms, if we teach effectively and efficiently.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the deeper and more profound understandings in math can’t precede or be substituted for teaching the algorithms.<\/p>\n If you don’t believe me, ask a typical middle school student to do some arithmetic for you these days.\u00a0 Few of them have mastered any reliable procedures for doing long division or converting mixed numbers or adding unlike fractions, etc.\u00a0 It’s time to accept that teaching one way of doing things is better than none.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s far better to know only one way to get there, than to get lost every time! There are educational gurus out there promoting the idea that by giving students multiple solution paths it will give them a deeper understanding of math.\u00a0 Generally these experts know this from teaching pre-service teachers in college, some of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":837,"featured_media":36420,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0},"categories":[101],"tags":[35,102,43,120,122,52,119,38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/837"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36419"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38491,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36419\/revisions\/38491"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketmath.com\/stagingserver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}