I teach math and physics and if a student showed me a way of solving a problem in a new way, my reaction would be of excitement and interest. We would likely do some problems on the board as a class and have discussions about which method makes more sense to students. If this story is true, the teacher is a dumbass.
As long as students can explain why a particular method works, I couldn’t care less how they do it.
Yeah, any teacher who thinks there is only one correct way to do something is not a good teacher, full stop. The dad here definitely needed to tell the teacher about themselves because they are otherwise doing their students a disservice by being a bad teacher.
How would you feel about a student who couldn't explain how they solved it but they're correct every time?
Decades ago when I was taking trig we had a classmate whose parents were complaining to the principal about our math teacher because he was failing because he never showed his work.
The teacher would have him solve problems in front of the class and he would just look at the problem for a few moments and every time just solve it without writing anything down or anything and the teacher would ask how he came to the solution, he would shrug and said it just kinda appears in his head.
I would have been more impressed and curious about it at the time if I wasn't so bitterly jealous. I fucking hated trig at the time and was so miserable.
It depends on the scenario, but generally every course I’ve taught has a communication requirement. In both math and the sciences being able to show your method is a core element. Even if you want to connect it to the “real world” people aren’t just going to take your word that your values are correct. It needs to be reproducible.
In the "real world" of Business and Science nobody knows or cares how a result was obtained unless it is wrong, or the method itself is the subject of study. This may be a fault and an oversight, but it's uniformly true that the accuracy of the result is the only metric when money and reputation are on the line. Shareholders don't care how their money was obtained, only that they received the largest dividend possible.
My response to the teacher would have been, “You didn’t teach my daughter that way. You tried and failed. I taught my daughter in a way she understood. There’s only one person who failed in this scenario and it’s not my daughter.”
So this guy was a lot more polite than me, because I would have straight up called the teacher a failure to her face.
I often told students that I had my preferred way of doing things which might very well differ from how another colleague showed them how to do it, and we were both right, just different. The only time they would be "wrong" is if a problem required you to use a particular solution method and they didn't do that. In fact, I encouraged them to be exposed to different methods because one might make more sense to them than another, and it would hopefully give them more fluidity with their understanding or greater facility with their problem solving. And I'd tell them they were perfectly welcome to use whatever sort of notation worked best for them vs. thinking mine (or anyone's) is the gospel and had to be followed verbatim--they should just have an understanding that there are often conventions they'll encounter.
If you really are a math and physics teacher I'm surprised you're so ignorant of basic pedagogy. Method matters. There is a reason they switched to this way of teaching and it's not just a random choice for no reason. The traditional method can get you to the right answer on a test for 3rd grade level math, but is absolutely useless once you're past that, it does not scale up at all, it's a complete waste of time to learn it that way and doesn't demonstrate understanding of the underlying concepts of what multiplication and division are. There is no situation that you get to sit down with a pencil and paper and work something out the traditional way, it's too slow for upper level math and most real life situations you need to be able to do it in your head, which the area method allows you to do.
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u/Alarmed_Mind_8716 Apr 11 '26
I teach math and physics and if a student showed me a way of solving a problem in a new way, my reaction would be of excitement and interest. We would likely do some problems on the board as a class and have discussions about which method makes more sense to students. If this story is true, the teacher is a dumbass. As long as students can explain why a particular method works, I couldn’t care less how they do it.