When due to lockdown I was doing some homeschooling and giving some exercises to my 7yo, I was also anxious to introduce variables; the magic "x" that scares so many.
I ended up drawing squares or triangles instead. Maybe they scared me less, but he really seemed to grok it. When I asked and what's the value of "this", he'd just give the answer without knowing something about equivalent transformations and the stuff.
Made me wonder if math should maybe be taught more intuitively, not so much about the formal stuff, which in the end is pretty useless for our minds if we don't have any intuitive grasp of it.
I'm fairly certain that's what Common Core was trying to do... And parents around the US freaked out because it was different than how they learned math and states like Texas made it illegal...
I ended up drawing squares or triangles instead. Maybe they scared me less, but he really seemed to grok it. When I asked and what's the value of "this", he'd just give the answer without knowing something about equivalent transformations and the stuff.
Made me wonder if math should maybe be taught more intuitively, not so much about the formal stuff, which in the end is pretty useless for our minds if we don't have any intuitive grasp of it.