Sushrut

After the mid term, I had flown to DC for a cool weekend and so I came back to teach, after a 6 hour long direct flight in the morning and zero preparation. I didnt even know what topic I would start and so after I took the book in hand started with the topic that had maximum number of pages in the chapter - polynomials.

I perfectly know now, that students here fear math out of no real reason. They are just not fine with it because everyone says so. There are some real cool students in my class (Cindy, Star L and Jose) but they are just a few steps ahead. I give them a small tricky problem here n there, and they are nowhere.

I think the problem lies somewhere in the way in which they teach math here. The physical significance of math is not taught AT ALL. and there is some significance, after all math is not ONLY numbers. Moreover, they make it so much more mechanical for them, the students who one lag (for any reason) are just never able to catch up.

I am not a qualified person to talk on how things should be taught and I am only a makeshift teacher with hardly any significant experience, but I really do not understand some ways of teaching that are followed in this country. And easily enough, I think of relating those to failure of the system to teach math to average students.

Polynomials was hard to them, i made a change in HW pattern and assigned them HWs from the book. It was more of laziness from me but was OK for them, specially for copy-cats like KIM and this didnt surprise me. She is used to copy writing math, from the board/book/neighbors book/whatever.

Week 5 began yesterday and I started with important linear systems. Here lies another big monster in the name of word problems.

Not surprisingly, all students literally fear WORD PROBLEMS. They know how to solve the underneath equation but they are not able to FORM a 10 times simpler equation from a little 3 line question. Its intriguing to think why this must be the case, and opposite in India, 'cause as far as I remember my own childhood, I just loved word problems because they had so much data in them!!

Tomorrow, I will teach them a few inequalities (not really a good topic, they hate those) and then we will have chapter quiz on thursday to end penultimate week.