That’s great, but very few elementary students have the motivation to seek out exercises to do on their own. Many of them require a teacher or parent to tell them to STFU and do your homework already.
I tried out the G.3 module and got to my limit of 20 free practice questions. And yes, it does require a space if you are going to enter a mixed fraction but it is very consistent. It would be nice if they put in logic to try and detect if the student is really trying to enter a proper fraction vs forgetting the space for a mixed fraction.
I found it interesting that the last few questions got very easy as I got to 90. It gave me two questions along the line of: 4 + 1/3 and 5 - 1/2. It didn’t start off with questions that easy.
BTW, I am very good with fractions. Lots of framing/carpentry gets your mind fraction’ized.
And the parent piling up more work on the kid if there is a mistake is going to teach the kid the value of homework? Is it going to teach that it works, and how it works? It sure didn’t work that way with us; the few kids whose parents hovered on their asses while the kid did homework were the ones who never learned to self-manage.
Exactly. I didn’t have a shitty attitude toward learning until teachers started pulling crap like this. “I explained it to you once. You just need to practice,” should not be an acceptable answer for a third grader who is having trouble with division.
I loved my Jewish day school, and did very well in school there, but I went into public school in the third grade, and hated it. Plus, I was put into a gifted and talented program, which I hated with the fire of 1,000 suns, because all it meant was that we had to do all the regular work, it was graded more stringently, and we had added work on top of it, that usually meant more homework, and we sometimes missed PM recess for GT instruction. I was terrible, and got removed from the program; I was so relieved. I had a week of bliss, then my parents got the letter and shit a brick; they went to the school and insisted that I be put back in the program, where I struggled for the rest of the year, and they punished me at home every time I got a bad grade on something. “Help” on homework usually meant they (my college professor parents) would explain something in a way that went way over my head, and then yell at me if I didn’t understand. My mother would just smack me across the face. So I’d lie and say I understood.
I continued to be put in and out of GT programs for the rest of elementary school, and the lack of continuity was hell, although if I wasn’t in GT for an extended period of time (if someone had the balls to tell my parents there were rules, goddam it), I’d start to do OK, and actually bring home some decent grades (not that my parents cared-- only GT grades “counted”). But then there’d be another set of standardized tests, and someone would say “Hey, Rivkah should be in the GT program.”
I really don’t know what point you’re trying to make.
Definitely agree. On the other hand, an acceptable thing to say is, “Give it a try, and I’ll come back and take a look at what you’ve done.” This is acceptable for two reasons:
- A students’ work is a diagnostic tool. If you’ve solved 56/8 by tell me it’s 48, I’ll help you a different way than if you tell me it’s 8, or if you tell me it’s 448.
- There are students who use, “I don’t get it!” as a strategy for manipulating adults into doing the work for them. Some do this consciously, but more often students do this subconsciously: they lack confidence in their own abilities and think they can’t do it, think they have to get someone else to help them. I’ve left students in tears by refusing to help them until they’ve made an attempt, then come back over to see they’ve done everything correctly; the most important lesson they can learn at that moment is to have the courage to give something a try.
Wow, I’m really sorry to hear that. I’m studying for my AIG license (it’s what GT is called where I live), and what you’ve described is the exact opposite of what AIG pedagogy should be about. Instead of taking the worst of the drill-and-kill world of mainstream classroom, it should act as a beacon to other classes, emphasizing in-depth exploration of topics in an interdisciplinary fashion that allows for student self-direction and creative responses within a framework of clear expectations. I know that sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but it all actually means something.
I tried helping my neighbor’s 4th-grade daughter for a few weeks about a year ago. She had to do IXL assignments. I didn’t think very highly of the whole implementation. Not only was it unclear in some cases just how the answer should be entered, it was also entirely unclear in a few cases as to what the instructions for the problem were. (Sorry, I can’t remember any examples after all this time.) There were 4th grade problems I couldn’t do because I couldn’t figure out what the instructions were.
When you got an answer wrong, there was always an option to see a clue or hint how to do it. This popped up a box with some help on how to do the problem. So some programmer had to program in the system a help text for every problem! Those hints were never helpful! If you didn’t already understand how to do that kind of problem, the help message was useless.
But, unfortunately on top of all that, both the neighbor and her daughter were idiots. The daughter could barely do simple addition (she counted on her fingers), and only sketchily knew her times tables, and didn’t have a clue how to do long division, although she thoroughly memorized the mnemonic (“Daughter, Mother, Sister, Brother”) which she only occasionally remembers stood for “Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down” (and even then, she couldn’t actually do any of those steps. She had absolutely no interest, enthusiasm, or motivation (except to collect those gold stars when she could). I gave up on her after a while because nothing was being accomplished but baby-sitting, which was apparently all her mother really wanted me to do.
(ETA: And furthermore, when I learned long division, there was also a “Compare” step.)