Quick Intro:

Classical Math Teaching= Typical Assignments and Formulas.

Classical Math Teaching

Classical math teaching involves a typical explanation of math equations followed by practice, homework, and tests. Traditional math teaching is associationist, transmission based, and algorithmic (Goldsmith & Shifter, 1997).  This idea makes sense to teach math in this manner. Without looking at the top of the page, you are already primed with the idea math involves symbols and numbers. They follow algorithms and equations. It would make sense for us to teach math in a manner similar to how we conceptualize information processing.

Classical Math Teaching is generally characterized by having children receiving knowledge and teachers are responsible to give information of the knowledge (Stipek et al., 2001). Teachers with traditional teaching tendencies instruct by using facts, rules, and laws to students. Students, in turn, are responsible to absorb and process the information. Teaching approaches under the traditional framework result in a textbook oriented classroom that fosters learning through memorization of procedures (Grant, 1998). There was a recent reform within schools to change math program (Grant, 1998). Yet, many professionals have yet to adopt this type of teaching style even if they wanted to do to standardized testing and other responsibilities of teachers (Park et al., 2016).

Since most of you are familiar with this type of math teaching. Here is a funny video for levity. The video is an attempt to explain the issues with this type of teaching, but also raise awareness of schools problems globally.