‘Not a Math Person’: How to Remove Obstacles to Learning Math by Katrina Schwartz.
From the post:
Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler spends a lot of time worrying about how math education in the United States traumatizes kids. Recently, a colleague’s 7-year-old came home from school and announced he didn’t like math anymore. His mom asked why and he said, “math is too much answering and not enough learning.”
This story demonstrates how clearly kids understand that unlike their other courses, math is a performative subject, where their job is to come up with answers quickly. Boaler says that if this approach doesn’t change, the U.S. will always have weak math education.
“There’s a widespread myth that some people are math people and some people are not,” Boaler told a group of parents and educators gathered at the 2015 Innovative Learning Conference. “But it turns out there’s no such thing as a math brain.” Unfortunately, many parents, teachers and students believe this myth and it holds them up every day in their math learning.
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Intriguing article that suggests the solution to the lack of students in computer science and mathematics may well be to work on changing the attitudes of students…about themselves as computer science or mathematics students.
Something to remember when users are having a hard time grasping your explanation of semantics and/or topic maps.
Oh, another high point in the article, our brains physically swell and shrink:
Neuroscientists now know that the brain has the ability to grow and shrink. This was demonstrated in a study of taxi drivers in London who must memorize all the streets and landmarks in downtown London to earn a license. On average it takes people 12 tries to pass the test. Researchers found that the hippocampus of drivers studying for the test grew tremendously. But when those drivers retired, the brain shrank. Before this, no one knew the brain could grow and shrink like that.
It is only year two of the Human Brain Project and now we know that one neuron can have thousands of synapses and now that the infrastructure of the brain grows and shrinks. Information that wasn’t available at its start.
How do you succeed when the basic structure to be modeled keeps changing?
Perhaps that is why the Human Brain Project has no defined measure of “success”, other than spending all the allotted funds over a ten year period. That I am sure they will accomplish.