They’re quite accustomed to me showing them videos and doing activities that are designed to build up their understanding that everyone approaches things differently, and we’ll all get there even if we take different paths. This guy wasn’t allowed to follow his path and do it his own way, and they were unfairly putting him on the spot and forcing him to do it their way.

It’s a rich problem, so I’ll use it again, but I think I’ll set it up and frame it a little differently next time!

I bought a bunch of hardwood yesterday evening. Unlike building lumber, hardwood is sold by the board foot–misleadingly a measure of volume: 12 inches by 12 inches by 1 inch.

Watching the man grind out the numbers for my chosen pieces of lumber was very very cool. Dude brought the full arsenal of tools to bear…tape measure, scrap wood as a notepad, office calculator, intermediate notes on paper, measurements in both inches and feet. Every bit of his work could be checked by the time he was done. Because my expectation and his final number were within about 12% of each other, I haven’t bothered.

It’s irrelevant whether the witness can or cannot calculate the question correctly, it’s whether it’s in the best interests of his client that he will provide any certain, meaningful answer at all.

And on that basis, he’s done a good job, considering he probably really doesn’t know how to answer the question.

Consider that HAD he provided a definite answer, it would invariably have been followed up with a series of increasingly complex calculations that would invariably at some point have rendered him unable to provide a mental, definite, and accurate answer. With this line of questioning in mind(something a witness must always keep in mind, not JUST the question asked at that moment), this line of questioning has no positive outcome for the client, and the witness is wise enough to know where the line of questioning is going and wise enough to know when to cut that line off at the head.

Mathematically I don’t rate him too highly, but as a lawyer, he’s definitely a smart witness and my man on the stand.

This is not unusual when adults train for new professions. Nursing students often get caught in a similar situation. An instructor makes a decision that a particular method of dosage calculation, for example, is THE way it should be done & accepts nothing else. This may arise because of what the research says about how best to ensure accuracy, or the choice may be rooted in how the instructor herself was taught to do these problems, or it may reflect the selection of a one-size-fits-all method that works across a spectrum of problems and can be picked up by students with a wide variety of math backgrounds in as short a time as possible. Instructors at this level are professionals in their fields and tend not to have the time, skill, knowledge, or will to champion flexibility, connect the dots from middle school math to the problems at hand, or fill in learning gaps that occurred decades before.

Adult learners can be even more reluctant to challenge such decisions than kids, and if their teachers are inflexible, then they learn to live & work inside the boxes chosen for them. Now with pumps pre-programmed to do all the calculations & conversions, nurses are even reluctant to question what they intuitively feel are incorrect results. So what do I think this man’s K-12 math teachers collectively might have taught him that could have helped him avoid this calamity? A predispoistion to expect errors and check results on a different day or in a different way. I think he probably did his steps & used his tools correctly but entered some bit of data incorrectly. If there’d been a policy in that office that no result went out unchecked by a different person because little errors can have big ramifications, the mistake would probably have been found, and the case would have remained focussed on who caused the accident rather than on the expert’s competency.

This is the moment we long for as educators, when the student realizes a current assumption or understanding is wrong and seeks to rectify it.

But you see what happens in an adversarial system that lacks safety for people. In this setting the realization that he might be wrong is horrifying and dangerous. He digs in, he stops trying to calculate because it might prove him more wrong.

I don’t think this is a bad person or a dumb person. I think this person is quite aware of how to convert fractions to decimals. But kick in the fight or flight reflex and all bets are off. The brain shuts down and figures out the most efficient way to short-circuit cognitive dissonance.

This is one of the reasons adversarial scenarios should be used in the classroom only when carefully designed. It’s probably also one of the reasons that the thesis — where you defend your point and demolish those of others is not the best foundational model of education. Peter Elbow used to talk (still talks?) about the need for Believing Games to counteract the effects of an unchecked adversarial system, I can think of no better advertisement for that than this. (Peter Elbow’s believing game: https://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/ideas/believing.html )

If you watch the actual footage, in the first minute he introduces himself as the president of an accident reconstruction company.

I’ll buy the not needing to know the ins and outs of the math for the average worker, but you’d think in such a litigious industry as accident reconstruction, someone at the firm would be able to explain the math behind the formula sheets. And if not the president, then hire someone.

I’m actually going to show this to my math sections and my business sections. Hiring the right people for the job is as important, if not more, as being able to do the job. Jack of all trades, hire a master.

Blah blah blah “wrong tool for the job”, “made a mistake typing in the original work”, blah blah blah “why do we have to convert fractions to decimals” blah blah blah GET BENT

He was asked for the decimal version of three sixteenths, and said he couldn’t do it without reference material. That was the question. Asked very clearly. He was not asked “how did you do it originally”. He was not asked “can you repeat the steps you took originally, using whatever materials you used then, to repeat your assessment.”

Massively incompetent. No question. No excuses.

This expert has come to the conclusion that math is a thing that requires formula sheets to understand and use.

The comment regarding worked examples seems to imply that worked examples can’t convey conceptual knowledge and depth of understanding. The research on process-oriented worked examples shows that examples can be modified to improve conceptual understanding. Read http://bit.ly/1YXiSLP