>>14232611Yes, 22yo Canadian here. I remember in third grade being taught math with "base 10 cubes". Each cube represented 1, 10 in a row has a value of 10, and 100 in a stack had a value of 100. We were made to model numbers like this. Looking back, I get why they did it, but it's one of those ideas that out-of-touch educators felate themselves for coming up with without realizing how it feels to a kid. A third grader already has some concept of numbers up to 100. The exercise is based on this theory that there's like "the four learning styles" or whatever and every child learns best with a certain style e.g. visual, tactile, auditory, kinetic, idk if there's other ones.
My schoolboard made it obvious that they were told to cater to "tactile/kinetic/ learners because it's more in touch with the kids who aren't doing well in school, so we had a bunch of bullshit confusing "gameification" of simple concepts that just wasted time and added artificial confusion.
The "x learning styles" theory already sounds like astrology for teachers to me. No idea if it's actually been scientifically verified at any point. But if it's true, I sure as shit was not a tactile learner then. Being handed these blocks and told that they're numbers, having to physically build the numbers, and having to learn the "rules" for building the numbers was very confusing and stressful as a kid. I thought that this was what advanced math was like and that my entire concept of numbers was wrong and that we were learning something super complicated. I've always sucked with building stuff/using my hands so it was daunting and uncomfortable for me.
I quickly realized it was just a pointless exercise to model numbers for the trades school stream kids and I was pissed that they wasted my time with that shit even as a 7 year old.
