Another day missed, with taking Em to an appointment and re-checking out the gym to sign up for a senior fitness class..where does the time go?

If you’re tired of me talking about the economy, I can discuss another of my favorite topics: math. Em asked me to help her with her homework yesterday (a rare occurrence at best). She was doing something called synthetic division. She showed me her work, which looked like Egyptian hierographics to me.

So I googled it and went to Sal Kahn’s Academy. As always, Sal explained it in a very straightforward way. Em pretty much knew what she was doing anyway, so we got it done together after watching the video. But here’s the thing: Sal said he preferred the old fashioned way of dividing a polynomial by a monomial ; I agree with him. Why is it high schools love to teach shortcuts that require memorization? Math isn’t supposed to be that way – it’s supposed to be logical and, well, mathematical, not tricky!

Her hangup was fear of fractions, which seems to get most students. That would indicate math education begins to fail in the fourth grade! I believe that to be true, having tutored kids for many years and seeing where their frailties lie. Life is good until we get to operations with fractions, likely because that is the beginning, not of logic but of rules and tricks that require memes and memorizations (invert and multiply, for example). No wonder we are 41st out of the 60 countries that track the PISA exam, a text given to 15 year olds in 72 countries. Our scores are tied with Israel and slightly ahead of Croatia. What to do? Create more on-line assistance programs so students don’t have to rely on teachers alone..Kahn Academy is quite good as an example. But how often has Em said, “I can’t do it that way, because my teacher does it another way and she/he says we have to do it that way. Sigh.