This New York Times piece talks about a Web site that teaches math to American kids using a curriculum from India. “Math homework in India consists of math problems that students work through, as opposed to the United States, where homework is heavy on reading about math topics in a textbook.”
This echoes some of my recommendations to computer science teachers in Africa.
Philip,
What was the reaction of your Ugandan audience to your suggestions?
Dave: The professors in Uganda were receptive and seemed excited, but then I am pretty sure that they went back to business-as-usual (lecture, lecture, lecture, no homework, lecture, lecture, lecture, exam). Now that the U.S. economy has tanked and graduates will have trouble finding employers financially strong enough to provide on-the-job training, I wonder if changing the way that U.S. schools teach CS hasn’t also become critically important.
Is that actually how math is taught in the US? My experience (in Florida) was very different from that CEO’s account, and he also has an incentive to tell the story he tells.
My math homework from 4th grade onwards was entirely made up of assigned problems (usually from our textbook) covering material that had been taught in class. If you needed to refer back to the section that had been covered in class to complete the problems, you could read the textbook.
ispivey: That’s what my experience was, and now is exactly what my two kids’ experience is. In fact, my 6th and 8th grader not only do math problems as most of their math homework, they have at least twice as much math homework as what I had when I was their age. Public schools, too.
I too experienced a math education heavy on problem sets and minimal on prose & theory. Actually, I have thought that I would have enjoyed more reading, as learning to solve problems by rote seemed to leave a gap in my deep understanding of the material.