Math goals (DLR Fall 10)

Idealistic statement

"The goal of teachers, like that of parents, should be to make our students, like our children, independent of us."

Other information

Research, some of it my own, shows that the retention a year later of much course material "successfully mastered" by students is a great deal more limited than (some) teachers would like to believe.--Draulston 10:16, 17 September 2010 (CDT)

Comments/Implications

If retention of information is limited, then the teaching style should either emphasize the basics to ingrain them, increasing the chances that they will be remembered (this choice would make for a boring class), or to accept that most of what is taught will be forgotten quickly and just assume that the students will need a refresher for old material being reintroduced. Even if students will forget what they are taught, the next time they see it they will remember it faster than when they learned it for the first time.

In order to satisfy the first assertion, making students independent of our teachers, it is not important whether or not students can retain material from year to year. The important part is the process- that way students will be able to come up with answers independently of their teachers. This class is so specific that the retention of the material is not as important as the processes taken to come up with the answers.--Swise 12:58, 17 September 2010 (CDT)

Even though some people will forget the basic concepts taught in math classes, I don't think it matters very much. Everyone who retains the information have a reason to; they will most likely either go into higher levels of math that build on this prior knowledge or they will actually apply the mathematical concepts in their later life, career, etc. The people who forget the information probably just don't care because they will never use this math ever again. This math may not be helpful to their later lives so they have little motivation to retain the information. --Amai 13:00, 17 September 2010 (CDT)

Perhaps the best solution to the retention problem is to focus more on the reasoning of the proofs and making them so easy to understand and obvious that students can come up with them on our own. -Deanna

It is often unnecessary to retain much of the information learned in school, because much of it is too specific and detailed to be relevant in life. What is important is learning how to think in order to reach a solution, which can be learned through gaining specific knowledge at school, but is not lost when the specific knowledge is lost. Therefore, the lack of retention of information should not be a major concern in making children independent of their parents and teachers. However, if your priority in making children independent is information retention, repetition is probably the best way to increase the percentage of information that is retained. --Kzhu 13:24, 17 September 2010 (CDT)

If the goal of teachers is to make students independent, then just the mastery of a concept can be seen as an indication of success. Being able to learn independently is more important than retaining the actual course material learned. The information learned may be relevant to only one field of study, while the ability to learn independently can be applied to all subjects. Even if a specific concept is forgotten, students should be able to re-learn it on their own. --Awang 13:36, 17 September 2010 (CDT)

Although it is important for students to retain information, retention is not the key to independence. The information learned in previous classes paves the way to independent thinking, but ultimately, it is more important that the students are able to think through a problem and then solve it, rather than memorizing ways to solve it. However, it is important that they learn key concepts in their classes in order to be able to think through the problem, so the basics should probably be repeated each year in order for students to retain them.--Sheinle 13:45, 17 September 2010 (CDT)

It is true that many students have difficulty retaining information which they learned in a course the year before. However, this is not very important unless the student is planning to go into a career which is relevant to that course. It is more important that the student learns how to approach problems independently rather than memorizing facts and formulas.--Yarefeen 13:50, 17 September 2010 (CDT)