Tuesday, March 11, 2014

1st Graders Homework

First grader's homework...aka parents' worst nightmare.





5 comments:

James R said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
James R said...

First I thought it was great because anything that teaches life, and especially math, is mysterious, must be a valuable lesson.

Then, I thought anything that teaches "*" as add is craziness.

Then I thought that, no, this is not adding. It is "jumping". Teaching the concept of "jumping" before "adding" is revelatory. Plus it shows the symbol representing discrete items on a sequential line is trivial or irrelevant. 02 "jump" (over the next) 3 lands us on 06 or 13 jump 3 gets us to 17. I like it a lot. Is this how the Irish teach? We should adopt it.

Big Myk said...

Even with Jim's comment, this is lost on me. What are we even looking at? What do the squares and circles represent? To paraphrase the Grinch, I puzzled and puzzled 'till my puzzler was sore.

What is missing? An explanation.

* * *

If this is how the Irish are taught, it shows. In the latest (2012) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, which tests skills of 15 year-old students, Irish students averaged a math score of 501. American students 481.

Sean Harvey said...

I saw this a few days ago, and admittedly took a long time analyzing the symbols, guessing and checking, consulting the Oracle of Delphi, praying to the gods for the crime against mathematics that I was witnessing and asking for forgiveness for trying to solve the unanswerable question of "What if?".

I can only think of one possible explanation for part of this, and this answer I lay at the alter of somehow. Somehow I was tired enough and filled with enough vitriol to push through this one.

What I see in the image is a counting problem, I see that if you include the number 13 and count to the number 15 you are going 3 numbers. If you count the number of dots underneath from 13 to the empty number 17 that is 5 numbers. In the right hand it is talking about how many numbers you go from 13 to 15 (In this case 3) and then from 15 to 17 (in this weird case 2) so on the right side is 2 and 3, and in the final box will be 5 for the total number of steps from 13 to 17 if you include 13 in your counting. BOOOOOOM GOES THE DYNAMITE.

Sean Harvey said...

or... what this guy said on reddit. . .

http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/205tu9/eli5_this_math_homework_for_my_first_grader/cg07c4q

I like my idea better.