Here's one for you:
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| Do even maths teachers argue about this? by T. Briggs, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
But before we get onto that, have a think about this one:
\[8 \div 2 \times (2 + 2) \]
I've had a post on this subject in mind for (quite literally) years, but it's such a contentious topic I haven't dared to commit it to HTML until I was sure it was ready. The problem is that with anything involving mathematics the conversation very quickly descends into complaining about maths teachers and listing what they're doing wrong and what they should be doing right, and how horrible and evil and lazy they all are. So:
Maths teachers are hard-working, knowledgeable gifts to society. This post is not intended in any way to be a criticism of these real-world superheroes. They are an endangered species as it is and I'm sick of seeing ill-informed vitriol directed at them online. Anybody who takes anything in this post and uses it to attack maths teachers hasn't understood it at all. The problems with mathematics in modern Western society are many and varied, and cannot be solved by maths teachers alone. Any proposed solution to these problems that begins with "maths teachers should..." is short-sighted at best.
Now that's out of the way I can return to my theme.
