I stumbled upon this article about the teaching of math… and it reminded me so much of why learning to program has been agonizingly hard for me.
Hmmm, I can’t say I am convinced yet. Admittedly, I am someone who math comes “naturally” *
That said, I have seen a lot of students who learned math like following a recipe, and they never seen to build the same intuition that the other students who struggle to figure out on their own before it clicks.
Idk, maybe it is a horses for courses kind of thing, but teaching a process before the student builds an intuition often feels like giving up the opportunity to learn in my experience
* shitloads of study
I don’t think this is saying math class has no room for discovering things on one’s own, or that it should be rigid; just that there really needs to be direct instruction first to make discovery possible. (And that direct instruction doesn’t have to be boring drills and lectures; there are lots of fun ways to teach math facts.)
It’s hard to use your intuition without at least a little background understanding of what you’re looking at.
No amount of guessing will make a page written in Latin suddenly make sense unless you already know enough Latin words to give it some context.
No amount of standing in a too-hot too-bright kickball field with kids who seemed to Just Know how to play kickball made me pick up on the rules (believe me, I tried, and this was pretty much my entire elementary school P.E. experience). Not until the rules were actually explained to me… six years later… did it make sense.
Putting me in a room with some eggs and flour and milk and saying “here, make a cake” won’t result in real discovery if I’ve never seen a cake before and have zero background knowledge of what a cake is. I’ll just become despondent when I keep ending up with wasted ingredients and inedible messes. Once I’ve seen, eaten, and practiced a few existing cake recipes, and understand how cake tends to work, it’ll be much easier to experiment and make it my own way.
And showing me three ways to solve a problem will only overwhelm me if I haven’t already mastered at least one way.
A good foundation makes it possible for eureka moments to happen.
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It’s first necessary to understand how “whole language” became accepted by so many experts without good evidence to support it. Otherwise we can’t trust reform.
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@Manatee what was your approach to learning programming? And why do you think it’s been so hard for you? I’ve taught programming for several years and I’m always interested in other people’s experiences when it comes to learning to code
Regarding the article, I can imagine how this “discovery-first” approach can be hard for many students. It would be interesting to know, though, whether these same students would actually get math better with a traditional approach or they’d still struggle and the teachers would simply notice the problem later, or not at all.
In my experience, but I’m no educational expert 
, a mixed approach works better. When I was teaching, for certain topics I let the students play and experiment a bit with new concepts before formally explaining. Sometimes this worked well because the lesson clarified some obstacles or issued they experienced while playing with the code
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I guess the main difficulty with learning programming is that I need it broken down one tiny piece at a time… and a lot of online resources don’t break it down into small enough steps. Or they’ll show an already-finished function and then explain that, which is visually very overwhelming. Visual clutter can be my kryptonite when I don’t already know what I’m looking at.
Totally agree that there needs to be a balance. I was miserable in the dry, drill-and-kill math classes of my childhood. They made me start to hate math. But I also floundered when left to just figure it out with zero context. I think a good approach for me would’ve been “first let’s do some practice problems step-by-step (ideally with visuals or manipulatives if possible) and then we can play around with this concept.”
But I dunno. I’m not an educator. I was just a kid who really struggled in math for several years, but was deemed lazy or “just bad at it” instead of offered support.
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