One wonders why Hollywood screenwriters try so hard to come up with more and bigger and scarier monsters each year, when the scariest creature of all is right under our noses.
In an AP-AOL News poll as students head back to school, almost four in 10 adults surveyed said they hated math in school, a widespread disdain that complicates efforts today to catch up with Asian and European students. Twice as many people said they hated math as said that about any other subject.Some people like Stewart Fletcher, a homemaker from Suwannee, Ga., are fairly good at math but never learned to like it. "It was cold and calculating," she said. "There was no gray, it was black and white."
Ooh, evil. Black, cold, calculating...Like Dracula, only you have to work long division by hand while he sucks your blood.
The key to making children interested in math is to capture their imaginations at a young age, said Dianne Peterson, a fifth grade math teacher from Merritt Island, Fla. While she must spend part of her class time with basic tasks like multiplication tables and fractions, she tries to make it fun."I do a lot with music with them," Peterson said. "I've got some CDs that go over the facts. Some of it is rap and some of it is jazzy songs."
Does she have them learn songs that diss their previous teachers? Because if she has to teach them their multiplication tables in the fifth grade, somebody wasn't doing their job.
The poll results are here, should you choose to peruse them. Me, I can't understand why more people didn't select Phys Ed as the most-hated course. They must have had way more flattering uniforms than my high school offered.
Posted by kswygert at August 16, 2005 09:10 PM