In a short but excellent post, Dan explains why, when it comes to teaching math, we need to give our kids less, not more.
As my (patient) readership has no doubt realized, the impotency of our textbooks to do anything but teach procedure has recently whacked me over the head. Part of this, I realize, is fundamental to the print medium, which doesn’t permit a layered application of mathematical structures, but part of this is the inexcusable lack of imagination of publishing houses, whose bundled supplements are both costly and unhelpful, who don’t understand that they need to help students less:
Exactly!
At all levels in K12, we spend far too much time drilling the process of mathematics and not nearly enough time challenging kids to find their own process.