Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Maths: showing working out?

e is my personal favorite.

lol the responses were interesting reading! thanks guys - it appears the issue is a world-wide one - this is a friend whose child is in a school in Germany. They are super strict there and he just does not see the point of showing his working out.

All the estimation stuff has made my DD insane. I really don't remember this obsession with estimating from my childhood.

Oh no! When we get to that point, I think I'll be afraid she WILL actually tell them how she feels, since by that time she will have had to endure many years of the writing and explaining how she got her answers.



DD9 brought home "estimation" sheets recently where they were supposed to estimate then divide. I have just been waiting to see those graded sheets come back home. None of the sheets told her how they wanted you to estimate - estimate up/down, to the nearest whatever, etc - nothing but "estimate". So in my opinion there was no answer that could be wrong because you can estimate any number of ways and each student can pick how they want to estimate.

DD9 basically just made it easy on herself and chose a number that the other number went into evenly, so she could do it all in her head. I warned her she may want to get a piece of scratch paper to actually work out the problems, then attach it to the worksheet. She didn't go for that. I assumed there was an answer key for grading these sheets and when one of her answers didn't match the key it would be counted wrong.

I haven't seen the graded papers yet, but if she gets counted off (other than doing the problem itself wrong) then I guarantee I will be bringing that up at parent/teacher conference.

Maybe those worksheets were just another form of "there is no wrong answer" - who knows!

Oh, no they aren't.

They're an evil kind of GUESSING GAME, though.




Thus the danger in asking children who are highly verbal and have been treated to this kind of thing how THEY feel about particular elements of the math curriculum.

DD, thankfully, had the emotional maturity not to SCREAM 'YeeeeeeHAW!!!!' into the phone at the Honors College advisor when informed that she didn't, in fact, NEED to show a transcript with MTH 112 on it to place into calculus next fall.

Just noting that this kind of thing takes quite a toll on kids who are not NT in their approach/thinking. It's sad to see. DD loves math. She just hates the math course. She's actually very excited by the material-- which makes her anger all the more intense when the crappy curriculum RUINS it and sucks all of the joy and real learning from it.

I love Tau. It's as good as 2 pies.