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[prytania3]

I teach a lot of high level developmental English (we have levels), so most of the time, my students aren't too bad. But the last few semesters I've been getting a couple of students who are practically illiterate, yet for math they are taking calculus.

I find this very weird. There might be a learning disability, but they are always students who are very poor and who were probably never tested.

Any thoughts on this?

[dellaroux]

I've had some luck teaching math-interested students about reducing verbiage in sentences by comparing it to reducing a polynomial to its lowest terms...that part can be kind of cool.

[kedves]

It happens the other way around, too, doesn't it?  I know some very well educated people who are great at reading, writing, thinking, and talking about abstract ideas but who can barely do algebra and who have a very shaky foundation in basic principles of probability.  They are different skills.  But your students might be at a disadvantage because they don't read much or at all.  I think it helps a person write better to read, but I don't have any evidence.

[plebeian]

I've had some luck teaching math-interested students about reducing verbiage in sentences by comparing it to reducing a polynomial to its lowest terms...that part can be kind of cool.

Oh oh oh, I am so stealing this. I'll shoot off a "Thanks Dellaroux!" into the ether every time I use it. You get credit, and my students get to question my sanity.

Also posting for updates. I see a lot of this, too.

[polly_mer]

I teach a lot of high level developmental English (we have levels), so most of the time, my students aren't too bad. But the last few semesters I've been getting a couple of students who are practically illiterate, yet for math they are taking calculus.

I find this very weird. There might be a learning disability, but they are always students who are very poor and who were probably never tested.

Any thoughts on this?

It's pretty common.  When I teach engineering and physical science majors, they can do the math with little difficulty, but many of them become quite upset at being required to write a coherent paragraph describing their results and conclusions because that's so much harder for them than cranking through a couple of differential equations.

Logically, as others have posted, math and English are different skills so it's not surprising that people would be dramatically better at one than the other.

[elsie]

I've long thought, with only anecdotal evidence to support my theory, that given the major types of thinking/processing - linguistic, numerical, visual, tonal, physical (athletic) - that most people are somewhat proficient at all the types of thinking, but that there are some who are primarily adept at one kind of thinking and very inept at one or two of the others, leading to people who linguistically adept but numerically inept, and with all the other possible variations as well.

[conjugate]

I've had some luck teaching math-interested students about reducing verbiage in sentences by comparing it to reducing a polynomial to its lowest terms...that part can be kind of cool.

Oh oh oh, I am so stealing this. I'll shoot off a "Thanks Dellaroux!" into the ether every time I use it. You get credit, and my students get to question my sanity.

Also posting for updates. I see a lot of this, too.

You might rephrase it as "reducing a rational function" (or fraction) "to lowest terms," since polynomials are usually reduced.  Or "simplify by collecting like terms," or something.  Am I being too picky?

Oddly, many of the greatest mathematicians were very gifted linguistically.  Gauss, for example, knew a remarkable number of languages.  I haven't taught upper-level students for a while, but many of my students seem to be hardly able to compose a sentence when I ask for one in my math papers (and I do, because I'm just that kind of evil character).

[dellaroux]

I like the "simplify by collecting like terms," thanks--yes, that's what I was picturing.

Glad it's useful! I think it's fun living in the overlap areas in the Venn diagrams of life. I'd always want to be peeking over to the other circles to see what was going on there if we had to segregate everything.

[cgfunmathguy]

I like the "simplify by collecting like terms," thanks--yes, that's what I was picturing.

Glad it's useful! I think it's fun living in the overlap areas in the Venn diagrams of life. I'd always want to be peeking over to the other circles to see what was going on there if we had to segregate everything.

Me too.

Also, I teach my students that mathematics is a language that (1) describes much of the world (not all of it, though) and (2) was invented by lazy people (which is why we mathematicians write "1" instead of "one," "uno,", or "une," for example). I then reinforce this concept of "Mathematics as language" as often as I can make it work. By the end of the semester, they say it before I do (while rolling their eyes).

[conjugate]

I like the "simplify by collecting like terms," thanks--yes, that's what I was picturing.

Glad it's useful! I think it's fun living in the overlap areas in the Venn diagrams of life. I'd always want to be peeking over to the other circles to see what was going on there if we had to segregate everything.

Me too.

Also, I teach my students that mathematics is a language that (1) describes much of the world (not all of it, though) and (2) was invented by lazy people (which is why we mathematicians write "1" instead of "one," "uno,", or "une," for example). I then reinforce this concept of "Mathematics as language" as often as I can make it work. By the end of the semester, they say it before I do (while rolling their eyes).

I use the same line about laziness.  I enforce it by describing the early pre-algebra way of describing the area of a circle.  Instead of using Pi, the ancients had to say things like "the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter," and instead of using exponents, they often had to describe quantities as areas or volumes. 

Thus the area of a circle to the Greeks might have been something like "The region bounded by a rectangle whose height is the radius of the circle, and whose width is half the circumference of the circle."  Today, writing A = πr² is just so much easier.  I blew their minds discussing how Archimedes found the volume of a sphere without any algebraic notation at all.