![]() Where to next? My current approach is based on Bruno Reddy’s excellent guide on how they teach negative numbers at King Solomon Academy. Working memory is overloaded with little performance gain. Some of these poor students then had to repeat this thought process again and again, without much extra certainty, and made little obvious progress. In other words, the metaphor makes things more cognitively challenging, but these difficulties aren’t desirable: they dilute, rather than sharpen, the focus on the key steps required for procedural fluency. ‘what’s the new temperature? It’s hotter without 4 ice cubes, remember….’.‘yep! So does the cauldron become hotter or colder?’.‘so the starting temperature is 3… I take away… minus 4?…’.The following conversation, thinking through ‘3 – -4’, was quite typical: ![]() For students who weren’t already fluent-ish with negative numbers, the metaphor was a cognitive burden. Yet it didn’t seem to help those who already found the topic hard. Here’s my take: a few teaching approaches I’ve tried, my reflections, and my current approach (and the lesson Powerpoint I currently use – though it makes much more sense if you read on!).Īt first I enlisted the help of Severus Snape and this creative resource, which offers a nice explanation for the concepts. Ie which rules, in what order, for how long etc. There seem to be so many different rules and I would love a blog post on how you would teach it. Much of this comes down to the classic ‘two minuses make a plus’ memory aid – a classic case of over-generalization – yet what can replace it? As Rob Brown tweeted, it’s not just hard to learn, but ‘hard to teach’. Yet even my sixth formers make mistakes using them, for example in differentiating reciprocals, or solving simultaneous equations. ![]() Adding and subtracting negative numbers – a vital topic.
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