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Read Liping Ma's book and I was disappointed


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Bill (or anyone), what book or program do I need to get the "how to" ? I THOUGHT I was doing a good job of teaching math, but my kids don't understand and I realized teaching long division that I really didn't understand it but was just doing the procedure that I was taught. My Ds wanted more and couldn't understand unless I could explain it better, but I couldn't! I was just like him and I didn't understand math until 8th grade when I had a teacher that taught us the why behind the how. But, it has been too long and that was only one year I was taught math that way. My son reminds me so much of me! But, I can't figure out how to teach him that way. I really thought I was and I think I was until we got to division. :blushing:

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I believe the issue for some of us is not that the book failed in some way but that we simply weren't coming from the same procedural-only background so the influence wasn't what we were expecting based on how greatly it seems to have influenced others. I simply can't conceive of "doing" math without conceptual understanding and I don't know if that was from my education or just how I think but I already have a natural tendency to go for the understanding. I can't grasp any other goal so this is all very foreign to me. There is no problem with the book, it's just not needed by everyone in the same way or to the same degree.

 

The problem is, I'm not sure one would know for certain where they are in this matter until they do read it (which is why I bought it).

:iagree:

I believe this is one of the reasons I did not feel the book had any WOW factors. From what I knew and what I learned on these boards I was not able to pull much "new" thinking from it.

 

Now that I read the Liping Ma's book, what do I read now?

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When I read comments like this, I would love to see an example of what you are referring to! Sat math is simple algebra and geometry. How does how you are teaching your elementary children make solving an Sat question easier?

 

Well, this is a rather simplistic example, but it illustrates the comparison I was trying to make.

 

As a child, if I encountered a problem like 498 + 327, the only way I would have though to solve it would have been the standard algorithm: in a column, 8+7, carry the one, 9+2+1, carry the one, 4+3+1, =825. It would *never* have occurred to me to simply add 500 to 327 and then subtract 2, taking much less time and effort and less room for error. It seems so obvious to me now, but truly only since I've been teaching my own children have I been exposed to looking at numbers and the relationships between numbers beyond the standard algorithms. On the SAT, I knew enough to generally figure out what the question was asking, but my conceptual knowledge was so weak that I was often unable to determine the most efficient and less error-prone way to come to the solution to the problem. And of course, the longer time spent on each problem, the less time to give to the rest of the questions, potentially lowering the score in that way as well.

 

I expect that if one is very mathy, they might figure these things out on their own. But I don't think that it is intuitive for most of us. I actually ended up scoring quite high on the SAT math, but still never figured these things out on my own. It makes me consider how much better I could have done, not so much on the SAT but on college-level maths, if I had been prepared with a more conceptual understanding of math and number relationships. In Liping Ma's book, I was disturbed by the American teacher's lack of conceptual knowledge, but mostly I was sympathetic because I understand how one could be "good enough at math" to teach it, without really understanding the underlying relationships that make math easier and more enjoyable and useful.

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