There are 2 kinds of math
I am stepping out into unchartered territory.
First off, I stink at math. Really stink, like so bad that I used to write my son's teachers notes: "I had helped with the math homework and it was automatically wrong and to please help him make the corrections because I don't know how to" bad.
Tonight was among the first really using the expensive calculator required for school. This thing is almost as smart as our car and not quite as smart as our computer. Our kitty Garfy is pretty smart too, he can turn the printer on and off with a step of a paw.....that kind of inatimate object smart that makes parents cringe and kids smack their hands together so that they can learn a new gizmo to scare the old people half to death.
Thankfully, my cuter half is much better at math than I am. Being married to him makes me look smarter than I really am. Anyway, tonight was a night that he calls "teaching calculator" not teaching math. Put it this way, the cute one is so annoyed he wants ME to contact the math teacher and let her know that she needs to teach math and not calculator....what in the world am I gonna say???? I like this teacher, she is super nice and really smart....and here's good ole Mom who could barely pass a math class to save her life. This ought to be good.
I will say this for last years teacher HE TAUGHT MATH. He might not have been good at some things but HE DID teach math and got our son caught up to almost grade level. Which from what we can tell has dropped dramatically this year....as we were wasting the year learning calculator......thus the cuter half's frustration with the Special Ed system.
Teaching the traditional methods (sans calculator) may be the best way to go....how do you know what to plug into the blasted expensive calculator when you don't know what to do in the first place??? At least with the old way you learned the formulas and other stuff and how it all worked (at least the other people did, I think I was hiding in a band practice room pretending I knew what I was doing)..
Anyway, today's lesson kids: TEACH MATH NOT CALCULATOR!! - from the cuter half.
First off, I stink at math. Really stink, like so bad that I used to write my son's teachers notes: "I had helped with the math homework and it was automatically wrong and to please help him make the corrections because I don't know how to" bad.
Tonight was among the first really using the expensive calculator required for school. This thing is almost as smart as our car and not quite as smart as our computer. Our kitty Garfy is pretty smart too, he can turn the printer on and off with a step of a paw.....that kind of inatimate object smart that makes parents cringe and kids smack their hands together so that they can learn a new gizmo to scare the old people half to death.
Thankfully, my cuter half is much better at math than I am. Being married to him makes me look smarter than I really am. Anyway, tonight was a night that he calls "teaching calculator" not teaching math. Put it this way, the cute one is so annoyed he wants ME to contact the math teacher and let her know that she needs to teach math and not calculator....what in the world am I gonna say???? I like this teacher, she is super nice and really smart....and here's good ole Mom who could barely pass a math class to save her life. This ought to be good.
I will say this for last years teacher HE TAUGHT MATH. He might not have been good at some things but HE DID teach math and got our son caught up to almost grade level. Which from what we can tell has dropped dramatically this year....as we were wasting the year learning calculator......thus the cuter half's frustration with the Special Ed system.
Teaching the traditional methods (sans calculator) may be the best way to go....how do you know what to plug into the blasted expensive calculator when you don't know what to do in the first place??? At least with the old way you learned the formulas and other stuff and how it all worked (at least the other people did, I think I was hiding in a band practice room pretending I knew what I was doing)..
Anyway, today's lesson kids: TEACH MATH NOT CALCULATOR!! - from the cuter half.
