*heh*
Okay, so my topic’s not the same as the Bye Bye Birdie tune’s. Here’s a switcheroo. A recent (well, 2007) book on school reform and what can go dreadfully wrong with reform efforts had one comment that made me hoot til I almost cried. “Oh, what was it?” you ask. Praising the intent of the “New Math” era and how it breathed life into Math curriculum.
Yeh, right. If anything were deliberately designed to wreck budding students’ interest in or understanding of math, it was New Math. Either it was a conspiracy of evil persons to completely screw kids up or it was a conspiracy of dunces who were too stupid for words… completely screwing kids up. That is, if their “intent” was good, the people who designed and implemented “new math” were monumentally stupid people.
4th Grade: “new math” screwed me up so badly, it wasn’t until I had a high school geometry teacher who was teaching just for the joy of it (her family was in Big Bucks City) that my head started to come unscrewed from “new math” so the threads could be reworked and I could have the thing screwed on right (as to math). From there, calculus, stat, whatever, was fun.
What’s the matter with kids today? A lot of it is remote educrats having screwed up public education for decades (with the complicity of lazy, dumbed down by their own school years, parents and stupid, compliant pubschool administrators).
[great story excised to protect the innocent]
Asshats.
Based on an explanation I heard of the way math is taught today, I think the “new math” of the 70s was probably simple and clear. It hasn’t gotten better, it’s worse.
Well, Norma, in many cases the educrats’ teaching fads have made it worse. But I know my wife (a pubschool librarian) volunteers time as a math tutor for gradeschool and junior high students, and she reports some “better” teaching practices in the schools where she teaches. BTW, her comment on “new math” was, “As a fourth grader, I thought New Math was designed to knock the slats out from under us and erode our confidence.” *heh* Said it better than I did. Of course, our “new math” experiences were in ’58-’60 or thereabouts.
My son was taught “math by consensus”, or was it “math by groping about”? The idea wasn’t to get the right answer when working on a mathematical problem… it was to work together and agree upon a way to solve the problem, even if the answer was wrong.
My other son was taught math by counting… using “points” on the symbols used to represent numbers. It was frightening watching him struggle with that… taking his pencil, drawing dots on the symbols (numbers) then counting the dots to get the answer.
No real learning what the symbols mean… no understanding of symbolic manipulation… no logic… no hard-and-fast rules. It was all about building the math student’s self-esteem.
And both of my boys hated it when I would tell them the correct way to approach mathematical problems. But they did eventually learn.
Yeh, I knew a HS teacher who ran her “AP” math classes pretty much that way. She provided the answers to all the problems for “tests” and the “study groups” got together and “answered” the questions by “discovering” the process that would give the answer.
*feh*
Math by committee.