Two blog posts have caught my eye. The first is Time Lag in Learning Mathematics<\/a> which talks about the time it takes for a student to learn mathematics followed by the observation that one cannot be said to understand a topic until one can apply it. This often only occurs in the year after one has learnt the subject which is why I often tell my university students that it will always be true that Last year’s course was easy, this year’s is hard and next year’s is impossible<\/i>.<\/p>\n A very important point that Mathematics under the Microscope<\/a> makes is that anyone teaching mathematics should have a qualification at least one level higher than that being taught. <\/p>\n It is so hard to convince non-mathematicians that teaching and learning mathematics is very different from most other subjects. This partly accounts for the appalling state of teacher training and observation in the UK and why I absolutely refused to be judged by unqualified observers.<\/p>\n In the second post the secret life of numbers<\/a> gives a quote from the book it is discussing which gives a better alternative to a question I often ask Why are people happy to admit to being innumerate but prefer to hide their illiteracy?<\/i> PS Mathematics under the Microscope<\/a> has an interesting response to this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two blog posts have caught my eye. The first is Time Lag in Learning Mathematics which talks about the time it takes for a student to learn mathematics followed by the observation that one cannot be said to understand a topic until one can apply it. This often only occurs in the year after one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":299,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}