What the heck is constructivist math? I’ve looked at several web pages and I still don’t understand what it is.
You have to be among the anointed to understand it. :-)
I took a whole course dedicated to it to maintain my teaching credential. I have seldom been as angry as I was in that course.
Ultimately it comes down to eliminating any drilling, since drilling does not impart “understanding.” This is replaced by learning mathematics principles not by having them taught, but by discovering them by the student’s own ingenuity. The teacher is not a teacher, but a facilitator. Abundant use is made of “manipulatives,” that is little pieces that allow the students to design their own demonstrations of math principles.
The net result is third graders who count on their fingers and never learn multiplication tables, who cannot divide because they can’t multiply, and high school students who reach for their calculator when asked what 300 divided by 10 is. Etc., etc., ad nauseum.