Has your child ever been evaluated in mental math?
Mental math is going to be worth 10% of every one of her grade 7 math tests. I think these are give away marks for students who excel in this area but will pull down averages in students that have poor memorization skills.
I have heard of students doing thse mental math excercises for their own benefit but have never heard of them being evaluated on it. Just wondering if my perception is right.
Re: mental math-today's beef!
Mental math is in my sons’ math books, 5th , 6th, and 7th grades. Yes they were hard for my guys too. Right now my oldest is in 8th and struggling with statistics type math scatter plots, leaf and stem graphs, etc. Me, I haven’t a clue how to help, never saw this stuff before. Good luck.
Re: mental math-today's beef!
Stem and leaf and box and whisker and quartiles and quintiles, and various other things that high school people realy LOVE, are minor and often not very mathematical (which is why the high school people love them) sidelines of statistics. All of these are ways of grouping data to make patterns more visible. Of course humans are pattern-seeking creatures, and finding patterns in data is a very good thing to do.Unfortunately a large amount of judgement is required to choose what method will best show a pattern, and whether any pattern found is meaningful or not. High school students, knowing very little about either math or the real world, naturally don’t have that judgement, so these are always exercises in frustration. Issues of judgement can be decided either way, so there is not always one absolutely right answerr to these problems, and that is another source of frustration. These difficulties are compounded by the fact that statistics is the science of large numbers, while in a high school text and working by hand you can only deal with quite small groups, so the you are trying to kill a gnat with a machine-gun, and it’s awkward at best. I tell my math students to hold their noses and survive the chapter as best they can.
Re: mental math-today's beef!
Back in the dark ages, we had mental math in class every day and we were tested on mental arithmetic every term. I’d have to ask my mother to look at the ancient report cards, but I believe that up to Grade 4 or 5 it was even reported as a separate grade from written math.
This did me an immense amount of good as a student. I have a very fluid sort of memory and it was not easy getting those math facts settled to stay in place. Because of the regular, step-by-step practice, five or ten minutes every day, I became much more accurate with numbers (and went on to be a math major). To this day I freak people out by doing calculations on the fly in stores, banks, etc.
It is also to be noted that others of my generation who went to those same dinosaur schools are also good at these skills; around here, if you meet a young salesclerk you sigh and wait for the calculation to be done over four times, but if you meet an old fogy like me you get quick and accurate results.
What makes mental math work is regular developmental practice. If it is just something that is thrown at kids at testing time, and if it is randomly chosen unrelated topics, then no, it is a bad idea, for anyone.
Very interesting. I don’t know if this is part of our math curriculum or not.
This year though we were finally wise enough to break up the math groups (somewhat) in fifth grade according to ability.
The main focus though was on the gifted math program because the parents said that their gifted/talented math children’s needs were not being met in the gen ed classroom.
Hopefully, mental math is not a grade in our average math class otherwise my son will be flat on his face!