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There is nothing more frightening than watching a room full of 5th
grade teachers NOT be able to solve a simple fractions problem! When
posed with a word problem, I thought some would flee in terror,
exclaiming that they never liked or understood those in school.
After three 8 hour long sessions, the facilitator reports that most
feel reasonably sure of the basic concepts and could teach them;
however, none would say they are comfortable enough to teach a word
problem.
I can add to this that at our CC, we are currently in the third year
of running a "Center for the Effective Teaching of Mathematics" for
K-8 teachers! Many of the 2- 6 grade teachers are so overwhelmed
teaching everything under the sun that math suffers. Also, since
most of them are math-phobic to one degree or another, this
exacerbates the problem.
There is nothing more frightening than watching a room full of 5th
grade teachers NOT be able to solve a simple fractions problem! When
posed with a word problem, I thought some would flee in terror,
exclaiming that they never liked or understood those in school.
After three 8 hour long sessions, the facilitator reports that most
feel reasonably sure of the basic concepts and could teach them;
however, none would say they are comfortable enough to teach a word
problem.
If they don't get it, they can't give it to the students; thus, the
cycle continues. We definitely need to fix the system at multiple