I remember learning about sets in elementary school in the 60's - subsets, unions, intersections (joins) - year after year, and thinking that I would never need this. Now I've been doing data engineering since 1989 (when it was called systems integration) and all I do is work with sets. So glad I had that schooling.
Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
41–50 of 106 posts
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#42This is controversial (and shouldn’t be) but what if instead of spending so much time wondering why ‘Johnny’ can’t add, we spent that money and effort on making sure that Johnny was fed properly?? Countries with as much child poverty as Canada and the United States shouldn’t be surprised when their testing results don’t improve. This is pretty fucking basic science yet I’ve been fighting this battle for over twenty y…
Schools in the US serve nearly 12 million free breakfasts and over 20 million free lunches to children every day: https://schoolnutrition.org/AboutSchoolMeals/SchoolMealTrend...
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Had exactly that experience this week. They're trying to teach my youngest how to subtract with carry. Now I taught her the column method about a year ago but she's not allowed to use that suddenly due to a new idea they have. Not a single one of the children understood it so the teacher went back to column method a couple of days later having pissed the time on that attempt out of the window. This sort of stuff…
I had a talk about that with a relative (soon to be retired teacher, got a decoration for his job). His point of view was that teachers should be viewed as technicians: they are here a apply a method, not to invent new ones. This doesn’t need to be robotic, it still give a lot of room for personalization. I find he’s really right, especially since in my country everyone want to do their own stuff in their own way. Th…
His point of view was that teachers should be viewed as technicians: they are here a apply a method, not to invent new ones.
I think this applies to most jobs really. Research and practice are different things, and even when the same person does both it's good to keep them at least somewhat separate.
I (almost always) kinda want my doctor or mechanic to follow what's known to work, rather than try out new things. On my own software projects, experimental techniques seem to cause issues a lot more often than standard "best practice" sort of techniques and I try to keep them away from important production system. Etc etc.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#44This is controversial (and shouldn’t be) but what if instead of spending so much time wondering why ‘Johnny’ can’t add, we spent that money and effort on making sure that Johnny was fed properly?? Countries with as much child poverty as Canada and the United States shouldn’t be surprised when their testing results don’t improve. This is pretty fucking basic science yet I’ve been fighting this battle for over twenty y…
Schools in the US serve nearly 12 million free breakfasts and over 20 million free lunches to children every day: https://schoolnutrition.org/AboutSchoolMeals/SchoolMealTrend...
That’s a wicked program but as of 2018, children were still the poorest age group in the United States. We have an incredibly long ways to go and while that program is a start, it’s barely a drop in the bucket.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#45This is controversial (and shouldn’t be) but what if instead of spending so much time wondering why ‘Johnny’ can’t add, we spent that money and effort on making sure that Johnny was fed properly?? Countries with as much child poverty as Canada and the United States shouldn’t be surprised when their testing results don’t improve. This is pretty fucking basic science yet I’ve been fighting this battle for over twenty y…
There’s hope yet: “The reduction in child poverty would be larger still, from 13.7 percent to 3.6 percent. Only about a quarter as many children would remain in poverty after the policy package’s adoption.” https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21456242/joe-biden-povert...
I’m very hopeful about that program, but if you’re interested, I’d love to show you a myriad of Canadian plans to end child poverty by certain dates in the past.
I have a lot of hope for the United States now but if my own country’s difficulty is a guide, this will be a tough slog!
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#46That we get any STEM talent at all is a quirk of selection and survivor bias, which very likely happens in spite of public education methods, not because of it. I have had some truly incredible teachers, but their ability was pareto distributed. Great teachers have nothing in common with the long tail of inadequate ones. The problem they are trying to solve is how to produce citizens with math skills while preserving…
I’d being institutionalized bad? PhD is nearly a requirement now to progress beyond mid-level in all top STEM fields, sometimes an entry requirement. I think this is because institutionalized people all think the same way, never too much creativity or questioning what is going on. I would say that this is useful for large organizations only, but the startup community is just as enamored with it, most especially venture capitalists as a group. People that don’t submit fully to some system end up not fitting into any system after enough years.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#47My grade two teacher demonstrated "venn diagrams" one day, it absolutely blew my mind. She had a bunch of coloured shapes scattered on the floor, then put one hoop over the triangles, another hoop over the red shapes, and then, what to do with the red triangles? My six-year-old brain loved it when she put one hoop overlapping the other one. And yet to this day I refuse to memorize the multiplication table. Rote learn…
> And yet to this day I refuse to memorize the multiplication table.
> Rote learning is easier for the teacher: easier to teach, easier to mark.
You're right, but there's still a good reason to memorize the multiplication table: more advanced math builds upon lower level arithmetic, and so the less time you have to spend working on the low level details, the more time you can spend focusing on the higher level understanding. So you memorize the multiplication table so that you don't have to think about it anymore.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#48I think that I had New Math in sixth grade, and I remember nothing in particular of it but learning about number bases (as Feynman remarked, kind of pointless), and learning the terms commutative and associative--though it was a long time before I grasped the latter.
> learning the terms commutative and associative--though it was a long time before I grasped the latter
I think it's kinda interesting—commutativity is so much a more clearer and approachable property than associativity, and it sounds more useful, but the later is far more important.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#49Within home schooling communities, Singaporean style math has quite a following. Singapore also tends to score quite high on international exams. Basically, they focus on fewer topic more deeply. They also teach from concrete to abstract. I wish American schools would adopt this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_math
There is another project called JUMP math which has shown some great results, and is now getting adopted widely in Canada. Essentially the approach is to present concepts as bite-sized chunks (more scaffolded) and make students gradually work their way up to tougher problems.
If you think about it, it makes sense: if the problem in math is people get stuck at some foundational step where they are required to "get" something, and start to think they "suck at math" because they are missing this piece, then making the steps VERY small will make sure everyone can make those steps, thus making everyone "good at math."
Similar to Singapore math, it's not based on a "textbook" that you read but an "exercise book" that you write and solve exercises in. I don't have personal experience with teaching using this approach, but I have heard many good things.
books: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=jump+math (non free) samples: https://jumpmath.org/jump/en/learn podcast: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/1...
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#50Within home schooling communities, Singaporean style math has quite a following. Singapore also tends to score quite high on international exams. Basically, they focus on fewer topic more deeply. They also teach from concrete to abstract. I wish American schools would adopt this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_math
Stephen Boyd is somewhat famous for his class in Linear Dynamical Systems that begins with an introduction to what DiffEq really is, and how to use computation rather than abstract rules of symbolic manipulation. I felt cheated that my classes had been nearly exclusive to the abstract presentation, which was mostly useless except for rough conceptual understanding in the rest of my engineering life.