In my experience, there is a pervasive "math fear" in the elementary teaching profession...maybe in the teaching profession in general (secondary math teachers excluded).
Our secondary GT teacher outright admits she doesn't know math. I think we have lots of truly wonderful creative thinkers in the teaching field, but perhaps their is a hole in creative math thinkers?
I've seen that. My son's teachers were thoroughly unimpressed by him being able to do long division on the 1st day of 2nd grade. Despite meetings and e-mails and letters over the course of the fall semester, nothing changed in his curriculum and he still had to do 4+7 (he was doing algebra by the end of 2nd grade and none of us even bothered to mention it).
Then one day in January, they let him read a 3rd grade book. He read it in the car driving to/from school and turned in a book report 7 days later. Turned out just reading it was a 3 week project for the 3rd grade.
All of a sudden, things changed. An offer for a grade skip came soon after. Go figure.
I don't understand this whole attitude (or lack thereof) toward mathematics.
If anyone out there has insight into it, I would love to understand more. Please tell me it's more complicated than a simple lack of understanding.
Val
