According to a recently released study, students that are having fun and are confident in their mathematical skills are actually not very good at math. Students that are less happy, less confident have better mathematical skills according to this research. On the surface, you can see flaws in the study - and that becomes even more apparent when reading the commentary by author Tom Loveless.
It's no surprise that the least confident singapore students score higher than the most confident US students. That fact is neither surprising information, nor is it an indicator from which a study on entirely unrelated factors could be based.
The only fact that could actually be derived from the study is that there is a vast difference in the teaching ability of Math teachers in the U.S. and that on the whole, that teaching ability needs improvement. Teachers need not focus on making students happy or unhappy. They need to focus on learning the best ways to transmit information to their students. They need to know multiple effective communication techniques so that students beyond a particular homogeneous mold can process and retain the skills that are being presented to them.
Of the teachers I had growing up, a few of my math teachers were among the most brilliant, motivated, and strongest educators that I came to know over the course of my educational career. There were others who sat at the other extreme end of the spectrum. Lucky for me, I always enjoyed math - so I was going to accumulate knowledge regardless of the instructor. For my peers, it was a crapshoot. If they were lucky enough to have a good instructor, they would learn. A bad one and they would end up struggling for years to come. One teacher could very well turn a student off of a subject for life. There were bad teachers in most subjects, but the math teachers really took the cake.
A good teacher (and more importantly a good series of teacheers) can inspire confidence and build strong math skills. Simple logic tells you that.
Happiness is Apparently Overrated Interaction
