Friday, July 4, 2008

Starting early makes a difference

It has been my experience that most primary teacher spend a lot of time worrying about a student's computation skills when doing math. This is without a doubt an important skill, but what I have been seeing is that too much emphasis is being placed on the rudiment and process of adding and subtracting and not the meaning of what it is to add and subtract. What I mean by this is the teachers only concern themselves with the end result of a right or wrong answer. I would encourage the primary teachers to spend more time using base ten blocks and cuisannaire rods to show students grouping and place value long before they would ever write numbers. Especially in first and second grade. When I taught second grade the SAT Math was a oral test and the students had to understand the concepts of place value that didn't involve actual computation but mental processes involved in understanding place value. I was taught that you always start with concrete concepts before moving to the abstract concepts yet most new teachers have very little training in how to use concrete materials and representations in Math.
Tracy Fields