Posted on 03/29/2010 12:45:10 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
On a forum discussing math instruction, a father talks about his son’s bad experience with REFORM MATH:::
“So they call it the ‘Chicago Method,’ eh? Good God, I thought it was just local 5th grade stupidity. This foolishness is national??
My son had a horrific time with this approach. By the time the teacher had spent week FIVE teaching the kids yet ANOTHER way just to do basic division, all the kids who had understood the first method were either bored out of their mind or have forgotten the approach that they DID understand.
That whole episode made us (and his teacher) crazy. But it was The Curriculum....”
If that sounds familiar, please see linked article.
Many communities have had major problems with Reform Math. There are a dozen different programs under the Reform Math umbrella. None of them works very well. Cynics will suspect that was the intent all along.
“36: The Assault on Math” analyzes why MathLand, Connected Math, Everyday Math, etc. are bad news.
An ignorant populace that cannot count the ways or their taxes.
Memorization requires brain work and God forbid the little darlings actually stretch their brains.
Y'did yer best, Johnny-boy ... heres a B-.
Next
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear
shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
LAZARUS LONG
So you didn’t read the article?
Ping to yet another “Everyday Math” fiasco.
“The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.”
Another one of my favorite Heinlein quotes. And essentially true.
Another reason for the separation of school and state.
Not until your challenge.
And the rebellious don't want to work .... the teachers.
God forbid the little darlings should actually stretch their brains.
No matter what 2 plus 2 still equals........(cypher, cypher calculate , carry a 7?, no, other hand,) rounded off to nearest...4.001!!!!
But WHY????
And can we go over WHY 2+3=5
And why both 2+2 and 2x2 = 4???
Distractions. Either they get it or they don’t. If they have to “deduce and get comfortable with” the answers to the basic times tables (0-12), they will never move on to more complicated equations and formula.
There are absolute truths and then there are theocries and matters of opinion. Notice the classrooms are not so open to “alternative thinking” when it comes to the myth of man-made global warming.
I was taught times tables only to the 9's ... the 10's and 11's were obvious and it wasn't until high school that I learned some other elementary schools taught the 12 table.
Is reform math like “math investigations”, or did they find ANOTHER way to mess up math teaching?
It’s this kind of crap that makes me laugh when teachers say they have to work 11 hours a day and half the summer. They wouldn’t have to if they would simply re-use the workable lesson plans, and re-use the tests that correctly measured the children’s progress.
Why should we have to write 10,000 lesson plans for every stupid class we teach every single year? It’s the same class!! Math is Math, and why can’t we have a single lesson plan to teach math to every student in the country? I mean, other than that doing so would leave a lot of highly trained educators with little more than a lecture job?
Well 10s kind of a gimme (add 0) and 11s kind of a gimme too (repeat the number with the exceptions of 10 and 11).
12 gives you a dozen, 12 hours, 60 minutes, and inches-feet unit of measure...
I think I just had to learn 0-10 in school but the others “get added to my quick recall” cache memory.
13 and up, not so much. But I can do 10 and 3...
It’s important to be right but speed will keep you from getting left behind.
See, back when WE went to school, there were only a few numbers, so it was a lot easier.
As someone who went on to become a mathematician, I thought the New Math was great—provided, as in my case, one only started getting it in 4th grade after one had memorized one’s addition and multiplication tables and the standard algorithms for the four arithmetic operations with multiple digit numbers. (BTW, they were right to stop making kids memorize times tables up through 12.)
The real problem is that we haven’t realized that the increased importance of mathematics in our society calls for an increase in the amount of time devoted to mathematics education. Kids should get *both* constructivist, figure stuff out for yourself, exercises and the old rote learning, and that means more time devoted to the subject. It also means, if it’s to work right, we have to stop letting math-phobic ditzes get certified as teachers, since the only way the constructivist approach works is if the teacher is mathematically sophisticated enough to recognize correct, but non-standard approaches to problems, and things that (seem to) work in a particular case, but won’t work in general and how to quickly show this to the children with an example where they don’t work.
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DC thinks its better if you and I can’t count to a trillion....
I disagree with that. It's far easier to do the math in your head than whip out a calculator and hope you get the right answer more than once in a row.
My kids have beat out public school kids in doing calculations hands down. They do it in their heads in seconds, while the public school kids are still entering it in their calculators and trying to figure out which of the different answers they got is correct.
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