Friday, March 23, 2012

Should we be laughing?


When I saw this video on the national morning news, my first inclination was to laugh.  Sure it's funny, there is a woman who clearly doesn't understand the fact that she was given a trick math question. But the real question is should we be laughing at her?  If this was in a classroom environment, this would create a horrible situation.  It would make the student who didn't understand feel embarrassed and ashamed.  We need to make sure that things like this don't happen, and if it does, the attention needs to be taken off the student.  If the classroom culture has been created to have a comfortable environment, then this may not happen.

I had two more thoughts while watching this video.  The first one was that I need to become a math teacher...fast.  People shouldn't be making these sorts of mistakes once they leave high school.  I want to change that, and show how math can be useful like figuring out how long it will take to drive somewhere if you are going a certain miles per hour.  The other thought was that the husband was incredibly mean, and that I would never put a tape of a loved one doing something foolish on youtube.  

1 comment:

  1. Interesting post! I saw this video.. and I did kind of laugh, but more just shook my head. It's probably only us soon-to-be math teachers who didn't think it was that funny, but rather sad. More than anything, it reinforced how important and needed our decision to be a teacher is.

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