ML/NJ
and if you don’t think any of that is deliberate...why just take a gander at Wall St....
The mathematics curricula where I went to high school in the 1970s was severely lacking. I had to take dumbbell math at San Diego State....
I graduated before this new math came in and I still can’t do algebra.
The math I took in high school was so advanced that I knew the first 3 math courses I took for my Chemical Engineering major. I also got a 800 in my Math SAT. The only problem was that I did not do high school here, I did it in Dubai. The school there was hell academically, had 4 scheduled quizzes and 3 exams weekly and that really kept you on your toes. It was a school that catered to foreigners living there.
They tend to be somewhat arrogant about their vocation.
Ping
My cousin is a newly-minted middle school teacher “back East”. He’s in his second year of teaching after working for and being RIF’ed from Ford about 8 years ago. He was an engineer.
He teaches 7th grade. He told me the other day that over 60% of his students have no concept whatsoever of how to use a ruler to measure something.
A few years ago I saw one of my friends kids doing the lattice method from Everyday Math. The first thing I said was that it looked like the old Napier's bones method of multiplication.
Everyday Math just seems to hang onto inefficient methods instead of using them as a stepping stone to the efficient ways of solving larger problems. Terc on the other hand looks like a nightmare meant to keep kids from learning and understanding.
I believe that textbook manufacturers and authors must shuffle the teaching method to promote new sales of books. How much have math arithmetic and introductory reading actually changed in the past two centuries? You can't have schools thinking they can just order a new set of the previous books when the old ones wear out.< /s>
PS as a smart ass I would give one answer the Terc problem of showing two ways of solving 36 ÷ 6 = ? as
10log(36) - log(6) = 6.
This video is very true - math instruction, especially at the elementary level, is horrible. “Reform Math” basically teaches kids to stack and sort blocks but expressly excludes teaching them any arithmetic - the ones the are mathematically inclined eventually figure things out for themselves but most kids are left with no skill at arithmetic and a pure hatred of the subject. They are not ready to move to algebra in middle school because they don’t have the basics down. Those that can afford it send their kids to private school or to Sylvan or Huntingdon (or homeschool), but the kids left in public schools without private tutoring are mostly not ready for college level courses in math, science or engineering. They probably make good “community organizers” though......it’s almost as if there was a plot to disable America’s technical excellence.
I was circulating the link when the video had fewer than 50k views....
“I’m afraid the Education Establishment is going to repackage all the bad ideas in Reform Math under the name Common Core Curriculum.”
Of course they will. They did the same thing with whole language. In this case, the teachers who teach math don’t know any more about math than I know about origami. They couldn’t teach Saxon or Singapore math if their lives depended on it. You can’t improve math education in government schools without firing the existing teachers and hiring hundreds of thousands of new, competent math teachers who don’t exist.
If you want to see what is expected in Japan, take a look at the factorization problems in Kumon Level J 55-60.
What you write is often very perceptive and helpful, but when are you going to stop with the school reform nonsense?
Thanks for posting.
Neil Boortz interviewed a guy who wrote a book that told about dumbing down American students on purpose, to be good little worker bees for the government, who could be easily entertained so that they wouldn’t cause problems by learning to reason and question the powers that be.
Does anyone know the name of that book?
Yes. ‘Core’
It’s called the core.
The other day, at a retail shop, I noticed something that I see all the time now, but I noticed that it appears to be getting worse. The younger people working there are dense and it shows. A doctor I know spoke of younger med students, raised on group learning, who now have to be told what to do, as they do not think for themselves anymore, even as interns/residents. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.