Posted on 09/14/2006 7:55:21 AM PDT by SmithL
THE NATIONAL Council of Teachers of Mathematics released new guidelines that, for example, call on fourth-graders to know multiplication tables and division.
Oddly, it's big news when math teachers call for students to learn math skills. So the Wall Street Journal and New York Times reported that the guidelines signaled a return to emphasizing ''basics" in math education.
Stanford University math professor James Milgram, who advised the NCTM on the new guidelines, told Education Week that the new guidelines represent "an end to the math wars." Milgram was referring to the ideological battle between educators, who believe that students should memorize multiplication tables and master long-division, and educrats, who believe teachers should encourage students to discover math for themselves and master estimating numbers.
In 1989, the NCTM was on the fuzzy side. The council argued that kids did not need to memorize math facts because, "The calculator renders obsolete much of the complex pencil-and-paper proficiency traditionally emphasized in mathematics courses."
State agencies compounded the folly. California educators argued that memorization of number facts was "a hindrance rather than a help in developing mathematical understanding."
In keeping with the NCTM's emphasis on children writing about math, developers of a California assessment test told graders to give more credit to students who got the wrong answer to a math question (but wrote a better essay) than students who gave the right answer without the right prose. California elementary schools scarfed up MathLand, a trendy program that pooh-poohed exercises with "predetermined numerical results."
The unofficial slogan for new-new math: There is no right answer.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I hate fuzzy math. It really does a lot of damage to the teaching of elementary school kids.
As sure as 2 plus 2 is between 3 and 5, student's will be harmed by learning their math tables.
Thanks Mom!
You should be able to do both solid math and fuzzy math....and in your head, not with a calculator or pencil / paper.
Fuzzy math is helpful when estimating a 15% tip, for example. Hard (solid) math is really helpful when getting a mortgage.
In high school 100 years ago when I was going, they taught us slide rule and how to find the square root of a number.Bet there isn't 1 person in a 1,000 that have those skills today. I know it took me a 1/2 day to remember how to pencil / paper a square root.
Oh, BTW, we used fuzzy math back then. In the days of analog clocks, when asked what time it was, we said "quarter till, or half past". Today, with digital watchers the answer is "9:47" or "8:26".
This goes deeper than mathematics. The above phrase is the mantra of relativism and a postmodern world-view.
If you read the whole article you will find that things really didn't change. Sadly, these kids are going to suffer because in math, there really is only one right answer and there is only one way to learn math - repetition.
Fuzzy math is a bad thing. But fuzzy logic is the way to understand Liberals and Alqaida.
I often tutor math to high school students and college freshmen. I've seen first hand how this works. Kids have no idea about how to break a problem down and solve the components in a sensible manner. Some of them can't even use a calculator to work the problem because they don't know what actually needs to be done.
Math is not intuitive. The vast majority of human beings have no talent for math and will not spontaneously "discover" mathematical relationships. It's a grind and it requires hardcore memorization until that magic day when the concepts and the kid's brain development come together. Get over it.
I didn't wait for my kids to have trouble with that Shiite. I taught them math the right way, years before any teacher ever had a chance to corrupt them. Needless to say, it worked - it had to work - for the competition (the other kids) essentially forfeited the game by using this fuzzy system. It was WAY to easy.
Early in the eighties, my older son was stuck in some special ed program that was little more than babysitting. After a particularly galling "conference" with the teacher, in which she showed me the math drill sheets that he would start but never get past the second row, I bought a used TRS80-M1.
I learned Basic, and wrote a program to generate random addition problems for my son. Each problem was presented on the screen for a short time. He had to type in the answer, and the program captured keystrokes rather than using the common input routine. Every correct answer reduced the time alotted for the following answer, and a wrong answer increased the time by twice the same factor.
Of course I kept score, and I accumulated the residual amount in the timer and added "bonus points" for speed. Simply increasing the number of problems presented per session made it harder, and increasing the initial time made it easier. Also, I could target the random number generator to keep the numbers below a specific value.
As he progressed, I added subtraction, multiplication, and division to the mix, and allowed selection of problem types or a random mixture of all of them.
I started him at 30 problems, then increased it, eventually to 60 problems - the last allowing less than a second for response. His daily assignment became achieving a perfect score, but he would sit there and practice for an hour, working hundreds of problems as he practiced his keyboarding.
Eventually, he was far ahead of his peers in mental calculations. Even better than me, a past president of Memphis Mensa.
evidently I have fuzzy math in my pants pockets.
Hideous woman, she wrote bad things about Steve Irwin. No forgiveness!
I beg to differ. Repetition did nothing for me, but once I understood the concepts, then it became trivial, at least up until I had problems understanding. I still have problems with wave equations, but I hope to understand them someday :)
Repetition is for rats.
I am not talking about wave theory. I am talking about basic math facts, such as multiplication and division. I would argue, though, that repitition is the form of practice problems is integral to learning math - from pre-algreba to Calculus and beyond. It got me through the Actuarial exams.
The point I was trying to make was that what works for some people doesn't necessarily work for everyone.
I will grant you that it is important to have the basic times tables memorized if only for expediency. For everything else though 'understanding' is much more important.
One other skill that I think is neglected to much is "estimating". I think that having a ball park idea of the right answer goes a long ways to getting the right answer, but in order to estimate you have to 'understand' the principles.
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