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[Tripon]

So earlier, this thread was posted about how teachers and students are struggling with 'Common Core' teachings. Seems Japan might be going though a similar thing.

It seems a similar issue has also come to light among Japanese citizens, as we recently stumbled across a series of online posts debating the practicality of marking basic addition and subtraction problems as wrong if they’re not performed in a very specific way.

Below, we’ve highlighted some of the most significant posts in the series:

“This was the procedure of doing addition that was taught in an elementary first-year school textbook published by the government.

Picture: Please match the blue dot of each equation to the corresponding red dot of each picture.

https://twitter.com/nihonnouen/status/666588155236106240?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

“Here’s an example of getting an addition/multiplication question wrong because of simply writing the numbers in the ‘wrong’ order. This student wrote ‘9 + 5’ but the teacher marked it as incorrect because there were originally five cars and an additional nine came after that, so the correct answer should be ‘5 + 9.’ I don’t agree with that at all, but I suppose it’s futile to complain.”

@nihonnouen: “There must be a regulation among teachers to teach it like this. For example, even if the teachers themselves don’t want to teach math using that method, they’re forced to teach it in a certain way due national curriculum guidelines, and they can’t do anything if students complain. It’s really unfortunate.”

@sekibunnteisuu [reply]: “It’s not like there’s a specific clause in the Japanese national curriculum that says ‘You need to teach it this way.’ However, that’s not to say that teachers have complete individual freedom in what they teach; powerful figures in the world of math education often endorse ridiculous methods of teaching.”

On another Math problem:

http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1389503003

“Problem [fill in the blank]: ‘There are five children, then three more join them. There are now eight children (___).’

My daughter wrote ‘in total,’ but it was marked as wrong. Apparently the correct answer was ‘altogether.'”

(Translator’s note: The student wrote awasete in Japanese, but the correct answer was deemed to be zenbu de. Like the English terms “in total” and “altogether,” technically either of these answers could go in the blank, but only one of them was considered to be the “proper” answer.)

http://en.rocketnews24.com/2015/11/...-wrong-is-this-being-logical-or-overly-picky/

 

[Slayven]

Teaching then what to think, instead of how to think.

 

[hateradio]

It's like they're teaching math and some form of ordering.

Are they teaching kids to work at McDonalds?

"The first woman asked for 4 items and the second person asked for 6."

So, if you mess that up, you're a bad employee.

 

[remz]

to me, it seems like they're trying to ingrain some of the math logic you use in programming to kids when they're first learning math instead of them having to pick it up later.

 

[Stumpokapow]

Again, I'm not really sure why kids are taught commutativity at the same time as addition rather than having them derive commutativity from addition. The latter approach seems both productive (in the sense that that instead of memorizing commutativity, they actually understand that it works), and prepares them for operations that are not commutative. *shrugs*

 

[Tinfoilhatsron]

So it was wrong then? What's the problem? Even if I don't like CC, the student did it completely wrong. There were 5 at the table. 9 more were added into the pile. In Elememtary school we did number sentences like this too. The answer is "5 + 9".

 

[Chuck]

So it was wrong then? What's the problem? Even if I don't like CC, the student did it completely wrong. There were 5 at the table. 9 more were added into the pile. In Elememtary school we did number sentences like this too. The answer is "5 + 9".

that's a matching problem without the line drawn

 

[Zaptruder]

Why create people that can think for themselves and can see how the system is broken, when we can create people that think what we tell them to?

That's how we'll resolve the looming societal issues!

 

[ehretreue.m.h]

Man, I would have been boned if I was taught math this way. Always wrote out correct, but absurd equations in my homework.

 

[Jazz573]

Should point out that in Japam, circle means correct and X means wrong. Tho some of you probably know that because of the PlayStation controller.

 

[Two Words]

Again, I'm not really sure why kids are taught commutativity at the same time as addition rather than having them derive commutativity from addition. The latter approach seems both productive (in the sense that that instead of memorizing commutativity, they actually understand that it works), and prepares them for operations that are not commutative. *shrugs*

If anything, doesn't this run the risk of making them think addition is not commutative.

 

[Tinfoilhatsron]

that's a matching problem without the line drawn

Right, but so is much of basic math before you enter calculus or "higher" level math in my opinion. Much of it is indeed just applying rules, matching numbers, and punching those into a calculator for most of my K-12 education. Wasn't really until HS that you are taught to thing abstractly or apply things into real life like statistics or programming or physics.

 

[AMUSIX]

Instructions say to do it one way. Child does it another. Work gets marked wrong.


I really don't see the problem here.


Understanding that 5+9 is equivalent to 9+5 is all well and good, but it's a separate lesson. Adults take this shit for granted, and assume that every child knows it naturally.

Again, the lesson is very specific in how the problems should be done. Instructions matter.

 

[jman2050]

to me, it seems like they're trying to ingrain some of the math logic you use in programming to kids when they're first learning math instead of them having to pick it up later.

That doesn't even make any sense. Addition and multiplication is just as commutative in programming as it is anywhere else, whether we're talking about straight arithmetic or logical operations.

 

[Milksheikhs]

First one makes sense as it is applying math to real life and order of sequence, but the second one seems kind of bs as far as "in total" vs "altogether".

Also, it's important to follow the directions. I mean there are many times where I got answers right but they were marked wrong because I didn't follow the directions. So, for example when given two correct answers out of four and the directions say "choose the best" even though both answers are correct..one is better than the other. But you would only know this if you read the part where it says "choose the best answer".

 

[Pibemanden]

Now my recent experience of seeing (-4)/9 being marked as a mistake where -(4/9) was given as the right result make sense (I live in Japan). Poor students getting dragged through math like that, I hope that people will complain and stop this practice.

 

[God Dayumm]

to me, it seems like they're trying to ingrain some of the math logic you use in programming to kids when they're first learning math instead of them having to pick it up later.

But that is not how programming works. The compiler and the underlying architecture are free to use whatever manipulations they need to compute a result. There is no set order in addition or multiplication

 

[bobbytkc]

I think this is representative of the teacher's style than the system.

Personally, I disapprove of this style of teaching.

 

[akira28]

I guess they don't have time to break it down and explain the context they want the children to think about these things in. Just follow instructions and if you make a mistake or don't get it, you're just 'wrong'. No education, just the state of wrongness.

 

[DEAD RABBIT]

First one makes sense as it is applying math to real life and order of sequence, but the second one seems kind of bs as far as "in total" vs "altogether".

Also, it's important to follow the directions. I mean there are many times where I got answers right but they were marked wrong because I didn't follow the directions. So, for example when given two correct answers out of four and the directions say "choose the best" even though both answers are correct..one is better than the other. But you would only know this if you read the part where it says "choose the best answer".

This is the lazy kind of teaching. It will fuck up kids' motivation to think about the knowledge they learned.

I am a scientist and I work on mathematical problems every day. I would never use addition to demonstrate non-commutation, simply because addition is always commutative in the regular counting systems people use every day!

In the first example, the awnser has nothing to do with addition. If anything the options should be given as '2 then 6' and '6 then 2', not '2+6=8' and '6+2=8'. The + and = operators have no business here. The question is therefore totally confusion and if anything the question itself is just wrong.

 

[Slavik81]

The choice of which component of the addition represents which component of the problem is arbitrary. Its not mathematically meaningful, so it's bizarre that any emphasis would be put on it. Some teachers seem to be going through a lot of effort to teach students a concept that is entirely arbitrary and completely useless.

I mean, yes, kids should just be able to follow directions and spit out the answer the teacher was asking for anyways. It appears to have been clearly explained what answer was expected. The lesson the kids learn is just kinda stupid.

 

[ISOM]

How about we just teach math the way society has used it to advance the past century? Why must we change a good thing?

 

[Mistake]

I see their line of reasoning with the pictures, but what does it really matter unless specific questions are asked about the situation? The total in the end is still the same regardless.

 

[hirokazu]

I'm a bit on both sides of the fence on this, but I can see why the student got the car question wrong though. There are two parts, one is the working out and the other is the answer. The student'so answer is marked as correct but the working out incorrect because it's incorrect in the context of the passage.

I think the working out part is trying to ensure students comprehend and interpret the passage properly. At the level the students are currently at, it's not clear whether they comprehend the sentence if they write the numbers out of order. I think the test could be done better by explicitly saying you must have the order right if they want to mark it wrong though.

Anyway, this is much less ambiguous than the 5x3 common core one.

 

[mclem]

Good luck teaching those kids commutativity.

I was vaguely okay with it for multiplication given that there are circumstances where it is not commutative, but for addition that strikes me as a definite, absolute no-no.

 

[Dryk]

It doesn't matter what the context of the question is, math is a very well defined system and within the bounds of that system a + b = b + a. If you want to teach a child the finer points of dissecting the way a problem is phrased do it in a language that allows for that (in this case Japanese).

 

[Alucrid]

Are neogaffers a still having trouble understanding what common core is?

 

[industrian]

Teaching then what to think, instead of how to think.

Asian education systems in a nutshell.

 

[User 406]

I get the feeling this kind of thing is due less to some "new" method in teaching and more to the kind of bad hardass teachers who are too lazy to grade properly that we've always had. The only difference is that now parents are pointing them out on social media, making them seem like a larger problem then they are, and conflating the teacher with the entire education system. All of my son's teachers have been great about encouraging the students to find different ways to come to the same answer. In this regard, the new different methods of problem solving that reactionaries on the internet yell about are very useful to them in giving the students a deeper understanding of mathematical relationships.

 

[Arkeband]

I see their line of reasoning with the pictures, but what does it really matter unless specific questions are asked about the situation? The total in the end is still the same regardless.

It's almost as if the question was specific.

This is the same thing as the other thread. Kid doesn't follow directions, gets partial credit, people flip out because kid could have used shortcut to get an answer that the question actually wasn't looking for.

 

[Ultima_5]

Are neogaffers a still having trouble understanding what common core is?

This is different, but most likely

 

[NoblesseOblige]

Don't see the problem. I for one think punctuality is important and should be better taught. If it asks to do it this way then do it this way. Most adults now fail at it.

 

[David Incorporated Esq.]

It's almost as if the question was specific.

This is the same thing as the other thread. Kid doesn't follow directions, gets partial credit, people flip out because kid could have used shortcut to get an answer that the question actually wasn't looking for.

Yeah, these threads are really frustrating to read because they're full of people who are apparently doing their damndest to purposefully misunderstand the situation. Learning how something works and learning how to use it are two different things in math, it's not that difficult a concept to get.

It's like how in calculus you learn the actual formula for derivation first:

And only after do you find out all the shortcuts like how the derivative of sin(x)=cos(x). So these threads are "Just teach them the shortcuts, nobody uses the derivation formula!!! OBAMA!"

 

[FyreWulff]

It's integrating following instructions into the math lesson.

It's a good way to check for literacy.

And schools have done this forever. Under the "old" system I was told negative numbers don't exist because I wasn't in the right grade to be dealing with them yet, even though I'd been shown them at home.

This isn't going to make commutative propertiers impossible to teach later.

How about we just teach math the way society has used it to advance the past century? Why must we change a good thing?

The "old system" also has produced one of the poorest literacy rates ever. It pretty much just abandons everyone that didn't "get" that system, and the newer methods are MULTIPLE ways of presenting math to kids to teach them it. Stop wrapping up how you learned math into your personal identity.

 

[Dali]

It's integrating following instructions into the math lesson.

It's a good way to check for literacy.

And schools have done this forever. Under the "old" system I was told negative numbers don't exist because I wasn't in the right grade to be dealing with them yet, even though I'd been shown them at home.

This isn't going to make commutative propertiers impossible to teach later.



The "old system" also has produced one of the poorest literacy rates ever. It pretty much just abandons everyone that didn't "get" that system, and the newer methods are MULTIPLE ways of presenting math to kids to teach them it. Stop wrapping up how you learned math into your personal identity.

Word problems existed before common core.

 

[MikeDip]

Yeah, these threads are really frustrating to read because they're full of people who are apparently doing their damndest to purposefully misunderstand the situation. Learning how something works and learning how to use it are two different things in math, it's not that difficult a concept to get.

It's like how in calculus you learn the actual formula for derivation first:

And only after do you find out all the shortcuts like how the derivative of sin(x)=cos(x). So these threads are "Just teach them the shortcuts, nobody uses the derivation formula!!! OBAMA!"

Absolutely different. I even used the same example in the multiplication thread. For your example, first you teach the understanding, then learn how to do it from first principles, then use that to derive the short cut. Then use that.

In this case it's ignoring the first principles all together and teaching an arbitrary method that is at best confusing and at worst wrong.

Like I said in the other thread. I have no problem marking wrong things that are done in the wrong method. My problem is the method itself, specifically in these two cases. It does so much harm.

 

[ElFly]

It's integrating following instructions into the math lesson.

It's a good way to check for literacy.

And schools have done this forever. Under the "old" system I was told negative numbers don't exist because I wasn't in the right grade to be dealing with them yet, even though I'd been shown them at home.

This isn't going to make commutative propertiers impossible to teach later.



The "old system" also has produced one of the poorest literacy rates ever. It pretty much just abandons everyone that didn't "get" that system, and the newer methods are MULTIPLE ways of presenting math to kids to teach them it. Stop wrapping up how you learned math into your personal identity.

The problem isn't that commutative properties are going to be impossible to teach later.

The problem is that the kid used a different method, applying commutativity, but he was marked wrong due to it, which makes the whole claims of "they are taught multiple ways of solving the problems" false. The kid used a different, completely correct way, and was marked wrong for no reason.

 

[Somnid]

Again, I'm not really sure why kids are taught commutativity at the same time as addition rather than having them derive commutativity from addition. The latter approach seems both productive (in the sense that that instead of memorizing commutativity, they actually understand that it works), and prepares them for operations that are not commutative. *shrugs*

Well if you observed commutativity and applied it then you'd be wrong so you can't derive it, it has to be told to you when the time comes. Non-commutative operations start at subtraction which immediately follows addition so you're only waiting until the 2nd operation you're taught that it's not universal. But generally there is strong evidence people remember things they are corrected on more than a bluff they made that happened upon a correct answer.

 

[Laevateinn]

Yeah, these threads are really frustrating to read because they're full of people who are apparently doing their damndest to purposefully misunderstand the situation. Learning how something works and learning how to use it are two different things in math, it's not that difficult a concept to get.

It's like how in calculus you learn the actual formula for derivation first:

And only after do you find out all the shortcuts like how the derivative of sin(x)=cos(x). So these threads are "Just teach them the shortcuts, nobody uses the derivation formula!!! OBAMA!"

I agree with you but think your example is funny because I do use that formula for FDTD.

 

[hydrophilic attack]

The only example in OP which I have a problem with is the "in total" and "altogether" one. I mean, what the fuck

 

[El Topo]

How come everyone seems to have an opinion on what is the best approach when it comes to teaching mathematics?

How about we just teach math the way society has used it to advance the past century? Why must we change a good thing?

You realize that there have been enormous changes in the way mathematics has been taught, even in the past century?

 

[Arkeband]

The problem isn't that commutative properties are going to be impossible to teach later.

The problem is that the kid used a different method, applying commutativity, but he was marked wrong due to it, which makes the whole claims of "they are taught multiple ways of solving the problems" false. The kid used a different, completely correct way, and was marked wrong for no reason.

I'm tired of hearing this. At this point you're trolling if you still parrot this.

If a math question says "Use <x> to find the answer", and you don't use <x>, you use <y>, you get partial credit. What is so hard to understand about this?

 

[LiveFromKyoto]

Why create people that can think for themselves and can see how the system is broken, when we can create people that think what we tell them to?

That's how we'll resolve the looming societal issues!

Dude, this is Japan. Things have been that way since like 1185 CE. The rules are the rules and the boss is the boss and that's that.

 

[boviscopophobic]

On the one hand, writing down an equation that represents a certain "real-world" situation is valuable. It's not enough just to arrive at the right answer -- for instance, if the child had written 11 + 3 = 14 instead of 9 + 5 = 14, it would be clear that something has gone wrong in their understanding of the problem.

On the other hand, it is intuitively clear that commutativity holds for addition. Enforcing a particular order of operands for a commutative, associative binary operator is the kind of pedantic nitpicking that might be more suited to a logic course, and I question whether 6-year-olds are the appropriate audience for this. A perfectly logical student who was forbidden to use commutativity and associativity would answer a question as follows:

Q. There are three stacks of pennies on the table. The number of pennies in the stacks are 5, 4, and 7, respectively. Write down an equation for how many pennies there are in total [altogether?].

A. There is insufficient information to answer the question because we are not given an ordering on the stacks.


Would 14 = 5 + 9 also have been marked wrong, because the symmetric property of equality cannot be assumed to hold until explicitly introduced? All this just seems more likely to make beginning students question their developing mathematical intuition. Why not delay introducing the notion of commutativity/non-commutativity until the students actually have been given nontrivial examples of both types of operators?

 

[FyreWulff]

The problem isn't that commutative properties are going to be impossible to teach later.

The problem is that the kid used a different method, applying commutativity, but he was marked wrong due to it, which makes the whole claims of "they are taught multiple ways of solving the problems" false. The kid used a different, completely correct way, and was marked wrong for no reason.

He wasn't marked wrong for no reason. The problem stated the numbers should be added in a certain order. It's called following instructions.

 

[garath]

It's all well and good to get creative with your answers and think outside of the box but students, especially at a young age, need to learn how to follow the directions explicitly first and foremost. It's a more basic skill than anything else they could possibly be taught but more important by a large order of magnitude.

In real life you will get rewarded for creativity but it means nothing without being able to follow simple directions first and foremost. I did a lot of training at my last job and I got so many kids straight out of college that felt they could improve on every system I had in place right off the bat. It was infuriating. Maybe 1 in 10 actually managed to make an improvement but it was after many failures. Failures that could have been avoided by following the directions and using the given approach initially until they had the understanding to start working outside of that approach.

For all the common core threads I see this is the one underlying thing I see glossed over by the people claiming the child was right because they showed a higher level of understanding of the problem. More likely they were actually just failing to apply the solution that was taught to them and happened on another "right" answer.