/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6929955
In an arithmetic set the goal of group activities would be to get children to routinely communicate in mathematical language rather than purely decoding (or encoding) the same exact symbols over and over again ad infinitum. Those group activities I made mention to but did not describe would have nothing to do with feelings, and everything to do with developing English (example) skills which parallel mathematical information.

It's my theory that math skills do get highly developed in virtually all children in schooling but are routine dissociated from their native tongues. The overkill on the monotonous repetition of (solo-worked) symbolic routines not only cause people that leave school to lose their math skills at an exponential rate over time, they also result in everyone performing horrendously on word problems across the board.

Increasing abilities to solve word problems would be an accurate measure of group and communication activity success and the human-development progress. In my experience word problems emulate real-world skills and real-world problems more accurately; so, not having better math-students is a tragedy we perpetuate by putting up with, allowing, and/or acquiescing to the current state of affairs. The real world with respect to math is more like mountain climbing and the way math is taught (at least with respect to arithmetic and algebra) is like walking up and down stairs until the bottom performs are on the brink of exhaustion. Problems lined up absolutely straight in symbolic and numeric form spoil children by robbing them of work they are capable of doing on their own and are a lie to form math takes on in the real world where they are never already lined up and perfectly accounted for you 'in the wild'.

I'd have to save another post for explaining the algebra group work, but it is a more difficult argument to make. I hope this makes more sense.