Rote learning is not the divil

Inspector Coptoor

Great article here by Ted Hurley

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/the-war-on-rote-learning-just-doesn-t-add-up-1.2203918

byhookorbycrook

Some rote learning is essential eg tables,

qweerty

Except that it's a straw man argument, because no one thinks that rote learning in all its incarnations is bad.

It's a garbled article, that requires significant structural editing, by a man who has little justification for opining on the subject.

Inspector Coptoor

qweerty wrote: »

Except that it's a straw man argument, because no one thinks that rote learning in all its incarnations is bad.

It's a garbled article, that requires significant structural editing, by a man who has little justification for opining on the subject.

Disagree completely

RealJohn

'Rote' is a four letter word in education these days qweerty. (Awooga?)

I'm nearly sure I've read that article before. I wonder if it's a reprint. Either way, it's exactly right. Yes, it's great for the students to understand things better but at the end of the day, some students will never fully understand why
4 x 9 = 36
but it if they know that 4 x 9 = 36 then we haven't completely wasted our time. If we spend all of our time trying to help them understand and they never do then we've wasted our time and theirs. As Professor Hurley says, you can grow to understand something if you know it and, like I said, then if you never understand it, at least you know it. If you focus on the understanding only then it's only of value if you end up understanding it, something not everyone will be capable of.

evolving_doors

I'd kind of agree with qweerty that it is a garbled article and I'm not really sure what the point of Mr. Hurley's lesson was... Although in saying that I wouldn't necessairly disagree with anything the good professor has to say either although he's reaching a bit here..

"A recent report on primary education noted our literacy and numeracy scores had increased for the first time since 1980; with some justification the claim was made that one of the major factors in all this was due to the near elimination of non-qualified teachers from primary schools. But the problem of non-qualified teachers of mathematics at second level persists and is getting worse."
Links as to where it's cited as 'getting worse' would be helpful!!

If Ted were giving a maths lesson in school I'd be just like any other student.

"Just tell us the answer Mr Hurley...". Has he come up with any solutions to this apparent quandary himself?

I'm of the thinking that looking at maths as a means to an end is a false economy and a perilous path to pursue, and thus, lobbing in the old catch-all of 'problem solving' and 'jobs' as the reasons why students should study maths is missing the point.

The solution lies in the question itself. Of all the subjects I think it's the most oft asked question esp. for maths "when will we ever use this miss?" or "why do we have to study maths sir?"... and then it's up to the maths teacher to go on about computers, statistics, big data, jobs etc.. does that ever change any student's opinion?? I doubt it.

I'd be very surprised if the question is asked just as often in any other subjects like History, Art, English, Music, French etc. (maybe in Irish though). Similarly, I've never heard a teenager moan about video games or 5 aside soccer opining "shur when will we ever need this in life?".

So to my mind the article is missing the point (if the point is 'the problems with maths education' ) by pandering to other fools who are missing another point which is a strawman i.e. rote vs understanding. Was his final answer to put in Number Bases and Matrices (I wonder is his field of research in Matrices by any chance)?.

doc_17

Was it Plato who said "what we have to learn, we learn by doing"? When you do things over and over again then you get a real for it, experiment with it, think of other ways of doing it and then you truly get it. Rote learning is not the only way, it's one way and it's a vital way when it comes to maths.

Mardy Bum

Without a large pool of knowledge to pull from in your long term memory your working memory will struggle and the best way to instill knowledge in your long term memory is by rote.

qweerty

Mardy Bum wrote: »

Without a large pool of knowledge to pull from in your long term memory your working memory will struggle and the best way to instill knowledge in your long term memory is by rote.

Are you an advocate of learning essays by rote? Would you contend that, years later, people effectively retrieve pieces of information from that comparative essay they learnt for the mocks?

Criticisng an over-reliance on certain types of rote-learning does not mean calling for its complete removal.

aunt aggie

As a former student of Mr. Hurley's I'm not surprised his piece was a bit all over the place. Lovely man and great mathematician. Anyone know whatever happened to the secondary school Maths book he was writing? Heard he was working on one years ago...

I think its obvious from a lot of the comments that teachers use whatever works. Sometimes its appropriate to use rote learning, other times its not. For students with poor working memory, it will never help them.

silverharp

For subjects like math I don't see a problem with rote learning, it frees the brain up when solving problems. In the US their new common core seems to be putting an emphasis on breaking problems down into an unreasonable number of steps which can fry the minds of kids. If a kid can solve a problem in 2 or 3 steps , they shouldn't be forced to do the problem using 10 steps.