- cross-posted to:
- professors@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- professors@lemmit.online
Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
I struggled with any math basically beyond fifth grade. It was incredibly hard for me. Math continued to build on the previous year until I worked my ass off to get C’s. Every year after that I got C’s all while spending hours and hours studying the homework and equations and doing problem after problem. I was in remedial math at community college. The only reason I passed college algebra was because the homework was online and I was able to do every problem over and over again until I got it right. That was 14% of my grade and got me up to a C.
Some people don’t get the support they need. In a subject like math that is detrimental.
Fractions and decimals. There it is. You never learned how to read .125 as 1/8 and vice versa. This is the most common thing in the US, maybe elsewhere. If you don’t really understand that, then Algebra and Calculus may as well be Greek to you.
What benefit is there to rote memorization of common fractions in this day and age, though? We all have calculators in our pocket and most often, real world problems aren’t going to come out to neat fractions like 1/8 or 1/4. I think the time spent on forcing kids to memorize a table of decimals/fractions could be better used elsewhere.
There’s no benefit to rote memorization. Understand how to fluidly convert between the two is necessary to understand algebra that your pocket calculator can’t just spit the answers out for you. Also for some reason calculators don’t do order of operations correctly, so it’s useful to know how the language works, not memorizing by rote.