Fractions

Steve,

This forum is to talk about teaching reading. You’ll have more success with your question on the LDOnline Teaching Mathematics forum at http://www.ldonline.org/bulletin_boards/tm.html.

Jessica
Forum Moderator

OK, this isn’t Teaching Math, but I’m here now, so here’s the short answer:

Your problem is the fact that you are teaching them to flip-flop the second fraction. This is a “quick trick” and is illogical and meaningless. Like all such quick tricks that are unrelated to anything else, it melts out of the memory like snow in July.
You can “teach” this in the sense of Pavlovian stimulus-response, see X do Y, and if you repeat it for two weeks a year every year then maybe by Grade 12 sixty percent of your students will do it more or less consistenlly (as well as hating and fearing math). This is the standard system.
Or, you can invest a month or two or three and actually really teach something: first, the meaning of fractions as measurements, concrete and meaningful objects; then comparative sizes of fractions as concrete and meaningful objects; then equal fractions as concrete and meaningful objects; then arithmetic operations on fractions developed out of measurements. Division is understood as “how many a’s go into b?”
Again, I constantly hear people say “I can’t *waste* all that time! I have to cover all this material!” Well, if people consider really teaching something so that it makes sense to students to be a *waste*, then there is no answer.

Have missed your voice of common sense.

N/t

I agree with VIctoria… but will add that generally these procedures that kids forget happen because they haven’t done ‘em enough. If you have graded practice every day in it and then it shows up as two problems on every test — and if they miss it, you reteach it the next day and they practice it every day (which would only take three minutes if you’d already done the groundwork — remind ‘em and then give a quick practice quiz with what they’ve just been reminded of so they get it right, nad do it again the next day).

Do the same thing with changing denominators. Teach them *well* the why and how of making the denominators the same… and then review it again and again and again and again.

Too many folks get to college having been dragged through a curriculum too fast every year for the past 13 or 14, depending on how often they’ve been retained. It’s like deciding that the way to get to lifting 100 pounds is to just charge at that 100 pound weight every day and wonder why you’re just frustrated…

You don’t know how much the positive feedback and appreciation means in the present difficulties of my life. Being able to provide help to people and having them appreciate my skills is a real pleasure.
I never went away, just got kind of involved. Some real-life students are making some gradual but notable progress reading independently. The house is 3/4 insulated and half heated — a good thing as we had a Montreal cold snap of -4F or -20C. The Chinese ESL students are pronouncing distinctly better than random new classmates. The new endocrinologist actualy answers his phone and is trying to adjust the thyroid dosage to get me back to a liveable weight. So thanks for all the thoughts and prayers. I’ll answer email but not sure when.
Anyone want to trade reading instruction for renovation work? I have lots of jobs to barter …

Absolutely. Practice and concepts are bread and butter. Practice is the bread, solid and nutritious and necessary, but too dry and hard to swallow all by itself. Concepts are the butter, tasty and valuable in reasonable quantity but far too rich as a single food by itself. Too many curricula try to do one thing only and fail to get a reasonably balanced diet.