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
Ping to yet another “Everyday Math” fiasco.
Another reason for the separation of school and state.
No matter what 2 plus 2 still equals........(cypher, cypher calculate , carry a 7?, no, other hand,) rounded off to nearest...4.001!!!!
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?
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....
Punch in an extra digit on the calculator, and they don't have any feel for numbers to catch the error.
ping
My niece was removed from public school in the fourth grade because her parents found the new math program too confusing for her. My sister-in-law is a science teacher and she used to develop curriculum for her county. She knows a poor curriculum when she sees one.
Anyway, math scores plummeted. Parents who could moved their children to private and parochial schools. I wouldn’t be surprised if the public school is still struggling with that dog of a curriculum they saddled themselves with.