Right Technique, Wrong Subject
I read this post by a maths school teacher, Brooke Powers titled “Who or What Broke My Kids?” . After teaching the basics of probability, she went into a school book prescribed exercise where probabilities were expressed as decimals, fractions, percentages and words (“likely”, “improbable”) and the students had to sort them in ascending order of probability. So what happened? “It turned into a ten minute nightmare where I was asked no less than 52 times if their answers were “right”.” And why did that happen? “My students truly believe for some reason that math is about combining whatever numbers you can in whatever method that seems about right to get one “answer” and then call it a day…Today they were given a task with no real correct answer and they lost it.” Highly irritated, Powers called for a break: “We talked about the need for them to stop worrying about if I think their answer is right and to start worrying about whether or not they thought their answer was righ...