RSSAlgebra and Arithmetic Education
March 16th, 2008 | 1 Comment
I’m going to argue that algebra is so hard to learn because students never really understand arithmetic to begin with. Math is inherently abstract*. If you only learn to do math in concrete terms, in the way that most elementary math is taught, you are not really learning how to do math. You are learning to be a calculator (and there’s no reason to learn how to be a calculator, because we have perfectly good ones already). But if you really understand the arithmetic, then algebra should be pretty easy.
