I told them that I would tell you!

Thanks.

I am feeling chastised for not applying more math in the teaching of grammar, which I know certain math brains can do. Some students like the grammar parts of English class because it’s more rule-based. It’s not as rule-based as math, or half as rule based as we English teachers make it out to be, but for the kid with a math brain it can really help them with English.

Unfortunately, I’m not math brained enough myself to cook those lessons up.

Taylor

I don’t know what to say in my defense.

There’s something going on in my head at all times, though, wondering just how strictly to teach these things, ’cause the closer I hew to the book’s definition of (e.g.) planes (“a surface such that, given any two distinct points on the surface, the surface also contains the unique straight line that passes through those points.”) and the deeper I push into abstraction, the more kids I lose. I make math more familiar at the expense of a lot of good formal learning. Someday, at the pearly gates of mathematics, I’ll have to answer for that, I’m sure.

I mean, I lie awake at nights sometimes over it, but I tell ’em planes are a like a sheet of plywood that’s as thin as you can cut it and runs on forever in every direction and I teach ’em that multiplying negatives just works like that.

And then I jump into application as soon as possible.

Sad to see some of the stuff used in PRIMARY (using dingbat symbols to intro variables) have to be reused in high school because the kids never got comfortable with letter variables. ARGHHHHHHH!

I’ve seen one example (in the IMP curriculum) hot & cold cubes.
So for (-3) * (-5)
If one takes away three groups of five cold cubes, the net temp. change is an increase of 15 degrees.

Some kids seem to understand this, some just rely on prior memorized knowledge.