[marta_morena_25]

Here is a crazy idea that needs to come before this: What if we taught our adult population to process their difficult emotions instead of suppressing them and stay active and move freely while working and studying.

Actually, this already falls flat in the first section. At least 90% of adult fail on that one. How are they supposed to teach something to their children that they themselves don't even understand? And teaching is usually much more difficult than understanding something yourself.

Which brings us to "school should teach that". But schools are not designed for that and teachers are not qualified for that. Hell, it's already an exception to meet a teacher who can properly convey the meaning of "1+1=2", not to mention a teacher who can teach children, who are not their own, how to process difficult emotions. Good luck with that

[danudey]

We were extremely lucky to have a great K teacher who really wanted to work with us and our son to help him through his difficult time adjusting to school. We worked with him quite a bit, and by the "end of the year" (i.e. spring break, when lockdown started), he was processing his feelings of overwhelmedness much better, and going to her (and just collapsing into a heap in her lap) when he felt overwhelmed.

Compare that to a friend's son, who is the same age as ours but has some developmental delays of some type (I assume). Their teacher told them that they had to "get this dealt with"; in other words, "fix your kid so I don't have to deal with him". Not exactly a welcoming and comforting environment for a child who needs to be met halfway.

I mentioned this anecdote to our son's teacher and her first comment was "wow... is she an older teacher?" And yes, she was. She's been working with kids for 30 years, probably isn't as flexible in terms of learning strategies as younger teachers are, and, probably even worse, has been underpaid (and under-respected) for that whole time, so she's surely just burnt out and waiting for retirement at this point.

Maybe if teaching paid decent money we'd have more teachers who could put in the time and emotional energy to nurture their students, rather than just putting them through the pipeline, and who wouldn't get so cynical and short-tempered by the end of their career.

[dstick]

Is there some deeper meaning to 1 + 1 = 2 you could enlighten us on? Most teachers I’ve met seem perfectly capable at getting at least that across.

[candu]

Well, if you want to be _extremely rigorous_, there's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica ;)

Less flippantly: pedagogically, there's a big difference between "here's your addition tables, memorize them" and "if I have 1 of _anything_ and another 1 of that same thing, I now have 2 of that thing." The latter offers way more opportunities for further thought: by that logic, if I have 2 things and I take 1 away, I now have 1 thing! If I have 2 rocks and 2 sheep, I can count the sheep by laying out 1 rock per sheep! And since I can add more things, maybe there are more numbers for those amounts of things too? And what about differently-sized things? Or parts of things? Or...

That's the difference between getting "1 + 1 = 2" across as a literal by-the-book fact, and getting it across as an invitation to build / connect ideas and ask further questions.

[jstanley]

I'm pretty sure that is already how addition is taught. I'm not a fan of formal education at all, but I'm not sure what you think schools are missing here?

[marta_morena_25]

"seem perfectly capable at getting at least that across" yeah, that's part of the problem. They already know that 1+1=2, or so you'd think. But you would be hard pressed to find a teacher who can actually explain WHY 1+1=2 (which is based in how our number system was created and using proof by induction). Anyway, that is besides the point, since you won't teach children math with college approaches, but the important thing is that most teachers don't understand what they teach, they just "say what they remember".

And that doesn't pair well with children's insatiable "why" requests, even if they don't utter them. Teaching children is actually harder than teaching adults, because most adults largely gave up on the "why" and just settle on "I gotta remember that, if I want to pass the next exam" (school did a good job with them I guess).

So why 1+1=2? There is a lot of depth in that that is left unanswered and children are forced to memorize the answer. From then on, a sharp decline of cognitive ability follows as they "graduate" through our excellent school systems...

[hackermailman]

Poh-Shen Loh has a math course for middle school kids, and a weekly live interactive youtube stream specifically to answer questions kids ask teachers.

One on his channel is to explain to kids how the determinant works, why matrix multiplication is done in that specific order, etc. Check them out sometime esp his Friday 'ask math anything' live lectures.