Don’t Be A Hack
People promising you tricks, hacks, and shortcuts fundamentally teach your students the wrong lesson. Not only are they assuming your student isn’t smart enough to learn, but they are also teaching your student that they should be chasing the grade/score, instead of focusing on learning/understanding. Overtime, tricks, and hacks build a straw tower that collapses with the slightest breeze. This causes students to lose confidence in themselves, stop enjoying school, or fear certain subjects. Over time, they devest in their education because they aren’t actually learning, they are just memorizing. But they get good at it. They are spending the least amount of effort to pass the exams and just like that you have a straight A+ student who doesn’t know basic algebra.
When it comes time to take college entrance exams like the SAT/ACT, many straight A+ hard-working students can’t seem to get the score they need for their college of choice. They try to cram. Memorizing entire grades worth of material they never really learned, stressing themselves out and ultimately underperforming. To save time and space in their brain they seek tricks, hacks, and cheat codes: a quick and dirty method to get them past the exam. But this is the same strategy that got them into this mess in the first place, and trying to memorize years’ worth of material simply isn’t possible for most students. They feel shame and both parents and students are confused as to how they could have done so well at math class but be underperforming the math section of the SAT. But the SAT tests are something very different than what math class tests. While math class tests your ability to use formulas and follow procedures, the SAT tests your understanding of only a few key math concepts.
The difference between math and math class is the difference between understanding and remembering. Take the midpoint formula for example. To find the midpoint of a line segment on the xy plane, students are provided with an equation and asked to memorize it. And that works. So long as they can remember it. But as an adult, having not used the midpoint formula in years you may have forgotten it. But you can actually derive the formula pretty easily and situate the midpoint formula in your understanding of other intuitive math concepts.
Start with an average. What is the average of 1 and 5? 3. Well, wouldn’t you know, the average is just the midpoint between two numbers on a number line. You may even have an intuitive understanding of this. What we are actually doing mathematically is adding the two numbers together and dividing by two. So in the xy plane, to get the midpoint of a line, you need the midpoint of the x values and the midpoint of the y values and that will give you the midpoint of the line. Well, it follows then really easily that you want to take the average of the Xs and the average of the Ys. And there you have it, the midpoint formula. I can even test your understanding by asking you to go one step further. The xy plane has 2 coordinates, x and y. If I had a line in three-dimensional space, x,y,z plane. How would I find the midpoint of this line?
This is the kind of thinking the SAT asks students to perform. So while memorizing the midpoint formula might get them the answer to some questions, it simply cannot get them to the understanding they need to answer a question like this.
To prepare your students for college entrance exams, college-level study, and the rest of their lives, we help them understand by focusing on critical thinking, conceptual learning, and building connections between familiar and new ideas. If we want critical thinkers, we need to teach students how to learn and think critically about information. Not take our word for it and memorize a formula. This builds confident, powerful thinkers whose understanding of the world is deeper, more adaptive, and stronger as they grow. We want brick houses, not straw towers.