Math teachers as football coaches

Hello, All.

Here (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/math-teaching-football.html ) is a recent article from the NY Times that you might find interesting.  It discusses how math instruction can be pretty boring for lots of school kids and how important teachers are in helping to make the learning of math interesting and motivating.  While it focuses on math examples from primary and secondary school, the underlying themes relate to adult basic education (both math and other subjects), as well.  

Paul Jurmo

(www.pauljurmo.info) 

 

Comments

Paul, I so appreciate your sharing this article at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/sunday/math-teaching-football.html. (I corrected the URL above, which apparently has an extra space at the end, so it cannot be accessed by clicking.)

My early story closely resembles Urschel's although I didn't become a math major! However, I did become a fair athlete and agree that I would have learned better being coached than "taught" through memorization and mental regurgitation of formulas and rules. 

I also appreciate that you shared your post with the Reading and Writing community. For one, although I had great writing teachers growing up, many people are taught to write by following rules rather than following thought processes in the same way that I was taught math. Secondly, I believe that in my math classes, I wasn't taught to solve word problems even if I memorized the rules, and my language teachers never thought of having us solve or write problems, which would have helped me a lot!  

Hear, hear! Let's have more coaches, and let's integrate numeracy with literacy whenever we can. We win, and the student wins. What a deal! Thanks, Leecy

I confess I had to get past my biases about One More Successful White Male With All The Answers Telling Teachers THey're Doing It Wrong...

His point is valid, though... reducing math to algorithms isn't fair to anybody.   

... I also wonder... had he *not* had all that "boring" math... would he have been able to have as much fun with it later?  It's important not to throw the baby out wiht the bath water...