When the mud monster was in elementary school, her math book listed about a dozen different ways to average a group of numbers. Along with a bunch of homework problems to be solved with those methods. NOT a word about how to do it, or what differentiated this or that method from “add ’em up and divide by the number of items”.
Becka’d been out of school for a couple days, and missed the classroom discussion on this. So she asked me. I’ve got a heavy math background, but had never seen that stuff.
Finally cornered her math teacher, who confessed that she had been given a few pages of stuff to use to teach the stuff in a classroom, and nothing for the students.
We missed that sort of thing when I was in school. Right before “The New Math”, actually. That actually made sense to me, but I can see how it might confuse most people.
When the mud monster was in elementary school, her math book listed about a dozen different ways to average a group of numbers. Along with a bunch of homework problems to be solved with those methods. NOT a word about how to do it, or what differentiated this or that method from “add ’em up and divide by the number of items”.
Becka’d been out of school for a couple days, and missed the classroom discussion on this. So she asked me. I’ve got a heavy math background, but had never seen that stuff.
Finally cornered her math teacher, who confessed that she had been given a few pages of stuff to use to teach the stuff in a classroom, and nothing for the students.
We missed that sort of thing when I was in school. Right before “The New Math”, actually. That actually made sense to me, but I can see how it might confuse most people.