Free Republic

Our Education Establishment is dumbing us down. How sad, sick, and pathetic. People calling themselves “educators” devote their careers to making sure no one is educated. Everyone has heard the complaints. But the fascinating question still remains: HOW DO THEY DO IT? Is it all just bumbling incompetence or do these people have secret techniques? One familiar technique is to remove content whenever possible from the schools. All right, that technique we can see. But for many years I’ve had the sense that deeper and weirder shenanigans were going on, but I couldn’t pinpoint them. Now I think I can....

What follows is just a short review of a book nobody would think of reading, a paperback published in 1964 to help parents understand New Math. But if you've been wondering how our Education Establishment has managed to sabotage math skills in this country, this review will be helpful:---------------- "New Math was one of the silliest, most pretentious, and finally most unsuccessful educational gimmicks ever devised; and this book perfectly captures the idiocy of it all. In fairness, the authors were trying to do a good job but their mission is to explain the preposterous. Prefatory copy in this book...

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...

In 1929, the superintendent of schools in Ithaca, New York, sent out a challenge to his colleagues in other cities. "What," he asked, "can we drop from the elementary school curriculum?" He complained that over the years new subjects were continuously being added and nothing was being subtracted, with the result that the school day was packed with too many subjects and there was little time to reflect seriously on anything. This was back in the days when people believed that children shouldn't have to spend all of their time at school work--that they needed some time to play, to...

On March 10, 2010 the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Achieve, and other organizations issued draft Common Core Standards (CCS) for K-12 mathematics and reading. We at CEMSE have examined the mathematics standards for Grades K-6 and have found them to be seriously flawed. If we are to have national standards, then those standards should be designed to prepare students for life in the 21st century. We believe that the proposed CCS standards for mathematics in Grades K-6 would promote a back-to-basics curriculum that ignores the profound changes that have taken place in the last...

The sum of two numbers is 65 And if the larger number is divided by the smaller number then the quotient is 3 and the remainder is 5. Find the numbers. Help.

Advanced Abacus Malcolm A. Kline, March 15, 2010 The Washington, D. C. suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland is one of America’s richest—in dollars. Its’ public school curricula is a bit more impoverished. “A top Montgomery County schools official has called the district’s tenacious and much-publicized push for all middle school students to complete high-level mathematics a ‘mistake,’” Leah Fabel reported in The Washington Examiner. Specifically, Susan Marks, the district’s associate superintendent for human resources and a former teacher and principal said that “One mistake that we did make is that we pushed every kid into eighth-grade algebra.” “Hallelujah,” Gordon Brenne,...

There's a thread full of math jokes, historical trivia, and pie/PI pictures, but no recipes. So, FReepers, feel free to post your favorite pie recipes here:

Today is PI day! 3/14 Tomorrow is the Ides. In Europe they celebrate PI day on 22 July.

Princeton engineers have made a breakthrough in an 80-year-old quandary in quantum physics, paving the way for the development of new materials that could make electronic devices smaller and cars more energy efficient. By reworking a theory first proposed by physicists in the 1920s, the researchers discovered a new way to predict important characteristics of a new material before it's been created. The new formula allows computers to model the properties of a material up to 100,000 times faster than previously possible and vastly expands the range of properties scientists can study. "The equation scientists were using before was inefficient...

Seattle's so-called "Discovery" math curriculum doesn't add up for a King County Superior Court judge, who rejected the style of instruction Thursday and ordered the district to try again. Last May, the School board implemented a district-wide math curriculum called Discovering Math. The curriculum was part of a five-year strategic plan that Superintendent Dr. Maria Goodloe-Johnson created. But Judge Julie Spector ruled Thursday that the board's decision to use the Discovering series was arbitrary and capricious. She ordered the board to reconsider the matter. "The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient...

Spurred by a succession of reports pointing to the importance of algebra as a gateway to college, educators and policymakers embraced “algebra for all” policies in the 1990s and began working to ensure that students take the subject by 9th grade or earlier. A trickle of studies suggests that in practice, though, getting all students past the algebra hump has proved difficult and has failed, some of the time, to yield the kinds of payoffs educators seek. Among the newer findings: • An analysis using longitudinal statewide data on students in Arkansas and Texas found that, for the lowest-scoring 8th...

Interesting. From this book (sorry, not all of the formulas converted right): Mathematical Signatures in Nature: A Sign of Design? “[The Universe] is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it...” – Galileo Galilei1 Math is the universal language, but it is not a human construct. Sure, we create symbols for numbers and mathematical computations, but math itself is more fundamental. 2 + 2 = 4 is universally true, universal in the sense that everywhere in the universe it...

Based on the fact that neither of the two primary political parties in the U.S. seem to know or care about the very limited constitutional powers of the federal government today, it’s not hard to understand why many American patriots are seeking a silver bullet in the form of a new political party. But how realistic is that idea, or more accurately stated, is it a dangerous road to go down?

DETROIT (WXYZ) - The results of a national test indicate Detroit public school children performed the lowest of all eighteen participating cities, and the reaction from officials now charged with leading the district can be summed up in one word: disappointed.

Making the World's Knowledge Computable Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Enter your question or calculation and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing...

Okay, we have tons of algebra programs that can work with numbers but do not have any help with Story problems. Can anyone tell us the formula for solving this, step by step. Nine pounds of Sweet Potatoes cost the same as Six pounds of Apples. One pound of Sweet Potatoes cost twice as much as one pound of Onions. While a pound of Apples costs 24 cents more than a pound of Onions. (we can't solve it with NO integers) Can anyone tell us how to do this?

More city kids are graduating from high school, but that doesn't mean they can do college math. Basic algebra involving fractions and decimals stumped a group of City University of New York freshmen - suggesting city schools aren't preparing them... "These results are shocking," ... "They show that a disturbing proportion of New York City high school graduates lack basic skills." During their first math class at one of CUNY's four-year colleges, 90% of 200 students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem... Only a third could convert a fraction into a decimal. The lack of math skills means the...

This article is also available as a podcast. A Gömböc is a strange thing. It looks like an egg with sharp edges, and when you put it down it starts wriggling and rolling around with an apparent will of its own. Until quite recently, no-one knew whether Gömböcs even existed. Even now, Gábor Domokos, one of their discoverers, reckons that in some sense they barely exists at all. So what are Gömböcs and what makes them special? Balancing act The defining feature of a Gömböc is the fact that it's got just two points of equilibrium: one is stable and...

Faster than the computer cloud