We hope that the engineers who designed the bridges you drive over don’t take the same carefree attitude towards mathematics. “We’re not interested in the so-called “correct” answer, we’re interested in the concept of number. One, two, three, many, lots. What’s the lbf/in2 yield strength of that load bearing member over there, many, or lots?”
I, for one, hope that engineers aren’t relying on numbers they multiplied by hand without independent verification for their final drafts. Especially since a lot of those calculations probably involve irrational numbers.
Of course not, they have cell phones.
They are punishment problems. Because doing problems over and over doesn’t help you learn. The software I had as a kid did something similar. But the way it worked was you were tested ahead of time, and if you missed a problem, you got a freaking LESSON to teach you. You got a test again at the end.
And that was when I was in fifth and sixth grades. That’s 1995-1997. And the software involved wasn’t all that new, as it ran on some old Macs.
Nowadays, I’d expect typos to be caught. I’d expect that the system would realize that a single wrong problem might just be a fluke, and just give you one more to try again. If you know how to do 9/10 of the problems, chances are there was a fluke. I’d take a full score into how much the student to be taught. I would expect it to maybe even have wrong answer plugged in in such a way that it knew where the kid likely made a mistake.
The system should not be worse than systems made nearly a decade ago.
(We also used this only a specified amount of time each day. You’re on a computer. You no longer need people to stay in step. I’m sure that made it much less frustrating. The only frustrating part was for those of us who got through the whole system early, since we weren’t given anything else to do during that time. God forbid that we be given an option to actually use the rest of the computer, which I don’t believe was even part of a network.)
Thanks for all the input. The program is called IXL He is currently working on 7th grade “Operations with Fractions” with G3 and G5 being the most trouble. You all can check it out. The problems start out simple enough but can get pretty tough at the end. My son says all the kids in his class hate it because its so darn easy to make a mistake and it gives you then more problems to do.
I dont see why they cannot design software so that say if you typed in 11/2 instead of 1 1/2 it would see what you mean and give you a chance to correct the typo. After all the kid is in 7th grade and 7th graders make mistakes.
I suspect you all remember the days of learning fractions. Finding the lowest common denominator and all.
Fun times?
Are you shitting me? None of my teachers ever pulled that shit - and God the Father would have had to come down in person to stop the riots if any had tried!
Our books had X exercises for each lesson. The teacher gave 2 or 3 as homework, with the expectation that the others would also be done as “practice”. If there were any that contained errors or which our training would not cover, they were pointed out so we wouldn’t break our heads against them. And if your grades were above a certain level on the partial grades, we got to “skip” finals (but might still be required to tutor our worst classmates, which wasn’t seen as a punishment but as a “we all need our backs scratched at some point” kind of thing).
Neither the teachers had time for more grading or to invent more exercises, nor the students got punished with extra work for something such as bad spelling. Lower grades on those subjects where it was considered appropriate such as Language, yes; extra work, what you came up with.
My brother and his wife were making The Kidlet erase and repeat any exercise which wasn’t 100% perfect - until the teacher found out and asked “is there any reason why you’re trying to turn my best student into a nervous wreck?” She found out because The Kidlet was running out of time in his exams; he knew the material, but alas, he was so busy nitpicking himself that he didn’t have time to put it down.
In a different context, but I have been forced to work with training course programs where only one answer is acceptable. We couldn’t say “write a result for each analytical value”, we had to say “write 7.5 as the result for pH and 33.45 as the result for solids” - I would gladly avoid any projects where that particular piece of software is used.
See what you mean, eh? What if what you mean is 11/2 because you mis-calculated, or just flat did everything wrong, or were just guessing to get the damn test over with? How, exactly, is the computer supposed to distinguish between a typo and a plain old wrong answer? It’s impossible without having some record of the work process. That’s why math teachers want you to show your work on written tests–if all they have to look at is a wrong answer, they have to assume you did the problem wrong from the very beginning and can’t give you any points, but with a record of your process, they can see where you went wrong and give you partial credit accordingly. Of course, typing in your work process, you still run into the issue of typos because kids are being careless.
It sucks that your kid hates having to do math problems, but then again that hatred ought to be a pretty hefty incentive to paying attention and double-checking his work/typing so as to avoid having to do more problems than is necessary.
For what it’s worth, the commercial bar exam prep course I took (BarBRI) has a similar teaching tool (AMP). It’s annoying as fuck but it works. And he only has himself to blame for a typo.
A human teacher with the tiniest smidgen of competence could tell what the problem was in an instant. If a computer can’t, that’s a pretty clear sign that computers are lousy substitutes for teachers, and this kind of work is not good.
But I don’t think that’s fair:
A QA engineer walks into a bar and orders a beer. Orders 999999 beers. Orders -1 beers. Orders asdfwe0r93fsdasd beers. Orders ;droptable [orders] beers.
If the programs has undergone good QA, someone’s gone in and tried to break the program, and has also gone in and entered data with every tiny error they can think of. Then they’ve made suggestions to the software engineers about how to deal with these problems.
In the example given, the program could easily look at answers to mixed fractions and count the number of spaces in the answer. If the number of spaces isn’t 1, a pop-up screen that reminds the student to provide the answer as a mixed fraction and to put a space between the integer and the fraction would be all that’s necessary; you then give the student a chance to re-enter their answer. If they enter another invalid answer, THEN maybe you figure they don’t know what they’re doing and need a lesson followed by some more practice.
This seems like a quality control issue.
So, in other words, you had to practice. And if you made mistakes, you had to learn from them, and practice more? How is that different from what I said?
This is laziness at its finest. I believe the most educational thing you can do for your child is move to an island. Get them some fresh air and exercise. And than home school them.
It’s possible that the program is a mandate and that the bookwork is the teacher–I think a lot of teachers are reluctant to implement a new program (that they don’t trust–often for good reason) in place of what they know (or think they know) works. So they try to do both, with the best of intentions, but end up really piling stuff on teh kid.
It’s also worth just flat out asking the teacher the penalty for non-compliance. It may not be much.
It really comes down to how much time math is taking. If the kid is spending 10+ hours on math a week (or even 5+, in middle school), that’s a problem. School + homework should be a full time job, but not a full time job and a half. Teachers often assign too much work because 1) it’s powerful CYA and 2) they really don’t realize what they are doing. It’s very, very hard to predict how long stuff takes. That’s why a heads-up can be useful, but only if you have concrete data.
Are you Lita Ford?
Exactly what I was thinking. This young kid might just learn patience, and you know, fractions. Or alternatively that his mother should fix things that aren’t fair in the world.
If the purpose of school is actually meant to be as a discipline certification badge, well, that could be done a number of ways; it hardly needs to be mixed up with (and distort the delivery of) education.
Which is to say, things that are broken should be fixed… We don’t need to maintain suboptimal aspects of school as an experience in how much the world sucks; the world does that well enough on its own. Incidental suckage ought be reduced.
I talked it over with his teachers and we agreed that if the program is overly difficult he doesnt have to do it all the way to getting 100%. He can stop at 90.
BTW, some of you might try out that IXL program and tell me what you think.
90% is a very reasonable goal. I’m glad the teacher was accommodating.
That’s one of the things I hated most about how math is usually taught. I absolutely agree that students need practice to reinforce the concept and become comfortable and familiar with solving the problems.
But… Having a kid do problems over and over because they keep getting wrong answers doesn’t help if the kid is having trouble understanding the concept/lesson itself. It can’t reinforce their understanding if they don’t understand it yet!
In that it was student driven, not teacher punishment driven. In fact, many would do the “extra” exercises as practice, without waiting for any grading. Later in college, we searched for extra sources of practice, such as other books on the subject, or old exams from the same teacher: I’ve “done” exams older than me (the teacher had been teaching that particular subject for that long).
That’s why having a skilled evaluator is so important. Does the kid understand the work but just makes careless mistakes (like improperly formatting the answer) or do they need conceptual help?
Almost all of my problems in learning math were of the former variety; I had little trouble with concepts and their applications but would always - always - fuck up some stupid detail along the way. The only way I was able excel was to force myself to keep repeating a problem until it was free of mistakes.
That’s why I’m a big proponent of educational programs (not just in math) that emphasize the mastery of basic skills (but not to an absurd degree like the OP’s software).
But that’s just my experience. Everyone learns differently and may require different tools. YMMV and whatnot.