25th November 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I taught a lesson last week that really got me thinking about the way we teach maths to students of differing ages. I’m tutoring a degree student doing maths as part of her economics course at LSE. What I noticed is that she was struggling to understand pretty much all of an example sheet (an eighth of the course) on convergence of infinite integrals. There are only 2-3 concepts to understand, and my student is pretty smart, so I wanted to work out what the problem was.
I realised that maths is taught so differently as we grow up. When we’re 5 we spend ages doing nothing but adding numbers together. The idea of addition is reinforced over and over again, and we do hours of practise. As we grow up we spend less time on each concept, and do far less practise to the extent where, at university, one example is considered to be enough before moving on to the next topic.
I’m not saying that lots more time needs to be spent explaining each topic at uni; there’s a lot to fit in, but I wonder why lecturers don’t give more straightforward questions to allow students to get used to the concepts. What tends to happen is that an example sheet has a small number of very difficult questions, and while I like that the questions aren’t mind-numbingly simple, I can’t understand why students aren’t given an opportunity to get used to an idea, like at GCSE, before tackling something very difficult. My feeling is that more simple practise would engrain the ideas in students’ minds, and prepare them much better for the more complex questions.