School and home mathematics

This is a response to Enza’s post, but when I’m at school I can only do new posts.

I also found this article very interesting because I never considered that are different ways of learning math to which students are exposed at home and in different countries. It’s not that I disagree with it in any way, I had just never considered that there were cultural ways of doing math. It is something that I wish had been discussed in my teacher’s college courses.

One of the most interesting aspects of the article for me was the teacher in Brazil’s response to Abreu’s question about whether farming problems were used in the classroom. The teacher’s response was based entirely on her perspective of student interest in future professions rather than referring to what they might already know or experience. I would also guess that it would be pretty intimidating to admit that you wanted to be a farmer in that class. The math in farming was so de-valorized that one student wanted to teach his parents how to do the school math so that they could be better off in life. I can only imagine the effect that this would have on family dynamics when children at being taught this at school.

In my class, I try to focus on different methods to get the same answer and we celebrate new ways to interpret situations and find patterns. I hope that I would be open to a student that had an entirely different way of doing math, but I guess I won’t know until it happens.