MetaFilter posts tagged with math and learning

Welcome to the Khan Academy

y10k — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:38:25 -0800

Sal Khan likes explaining things, and he's really good at it. Here he is on CNN giving an excellent explanation of the financial crisis. And here's a great explanation of Newton's Law of Gravitation. His YouTube channel has over 700 lectures and you leave understanding everything he talks about no matter the subject.

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

davar — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 03:02:27 -0800

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth. How children learn (or: don't learn) math today. The video explains the new ways children are taught division and multiplication and what is wrong with new new math (not to be confused with the new math that was taught in the sixties) or whole math. From the textbook in the video:The authors of Everyday Mathematics do not believe it is worth students’ time and effort to fully develop highly efficient paper-and-pencil algorithms for all possible whole-number, fraction, and decimal division problems. Mastery of the intricacies of such algorithms is a huge endeavor, one that experience tells us is doomed to failure for many students. It is simply counter-productive to invest many hours of precious class time on such algorithms. The mathematical payoff is not worth the cost, particularly because quotients can be found quickly and accurately with a calculator.

Crank That Honor Roll

The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 01:10:05 -0800

Smart Shorties is a new CD being marketed to teachers that takes the beats from popular rap songs and rewrites them to the multiplication tables, with the intent of improving kids' math skills. Forbes has a nice roundup on it's history, and NPR has done a featurette on it as well At the very least, it's certainly worth a listen for the chuckle potential, but in addition to that, it's an interesting example of the now-booming Edutainment industry, something that not only spans CD's, but also computer games and even standalone video game consoles.

also, Smart Shorties is certainly not the only "Hip-hop in the classroom" product out there, nor is it the first.

A Mathematician's Lament

blasdelf — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:34:22 -0800

“…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”

“A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds — a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun.”

It's a beautiful 25-page PDF, just 392k. (via)