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Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

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Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#51

Post by dredmorbius »

jl2718 wrote: post #50
rlvesco7 wrote: post #14

Within 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.

EE263: Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems Stephen Boyd, Stanford University

http://ee263.stanford.edu/archive/

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#52

Post by godelzilla »

Why would we expect teachers to understand math when they're generally not mathematicians? Why would we expect teachers to change the system that created them? Why would we expect a system that was created for sorting people to educate people? Students are trained to serve, not to think.

https://poibella.org/papers/indefenseofmath.pdf

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#53

Post by xphos »

mcphage wrote: post #47
mathgenius wrote: post #23

My 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 unders…

I'd agree that knowing basic arithmetic is important but the issue is deeper in America. The rules and problem type issue is a direct result of uninspired math teaching. Teaching arithmetic for the sake of arithmetic is boring and uninspired and leaves a person incapable of doing both the arithmetic and math. You don't need arithmetic if you have nothing to apply it too. Arithmetic is a tool but a tool without a problem to apply it to is easily forgotten.

Take this from someone who could get through advanced complex analysis but who is also bad at arithmetic. Time plus checking solves all arithmetic issues but arithmetic never solves a realistic problem. Even balancing checks(not that is useful today) if you only know how to computer you'll be at a lost until you know what to compute.

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#54

Post by harperlee »

hluska wrote: post #44
Minor49er wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> children were still the poorest age group

What... does that mean?

I see how someone who cannot (legally) work yet can be poorer than other age groups, but I am sure that’s not what is meant. But is a child somehow deemed poorer than its caregivers? Or perhaps is the child as poor as its poorest caregiver? Or how does that fact appear?

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#55

Post by [deleted] »

hluska wrote: post #26

This 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…

[deleted]

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#56

Post by JamesBarney »

hluska wrote: post #44
Minor49er wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How weird would it be if they weren't the poorest age group?

I really don't expect my kids to have more disposable income than I do.

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#57

Post by Minor49er »

hluska wrote: post #44
Minor49er wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are more food programs a solution to what you're proposing?

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#58

Post by unethical_ban »

Anecdote: I was an ADD kid in the 90s Undiagnosed, but intelligent and bored and distracted easily. So much so, that during math, one other kid and I were sat outside the classroom in the hallway, and with very little assistance from the teachers, given worksheets on base-5 math. I essentially taught myself what different bases are, what digits represent, and so on.

I thought of this the other day as I listened to Radiolab do a thoroughly piss poor job of explaining binary, as part of a larger discussion about computer memory and the relevance of 4096 to a computer error.

I mean, they spent a lot of time talking about light bulbs going on and off, and then how, if you represent 2, you flick one bulb off and another on, but if you represent 3, you leave the first bulb on, etc. They did finally mention powers, but not in a generic sense. They didn't ever mention that binary is "just" base 2 math like normal math is base 10.

It seemed so contrived. I know they were trying to explain it to the layman, but it seems they actually made it more conceptually difficult.

I haven't been able to rant about this and here seems like the best spot.

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#59

Post by jhardy54 »

harperlee wrote: post #54
hluska wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> children were still the poorest age group What... does that mean? I see how someone who cannot (legally) work yet can be poorer than other age groups, but I am sure that’s not what is meant. But is a child somehow deemed poorer than its caregivers? Or perhaps is the child as poor as its poorest caregiver? Or how does that fact appear?

I'm curious about this too. My best guess is that they're measuring household income and there are a lot of kids with low household incomes (more than adults with low household incomes, especially when you have more kids than adults in a household).

/shrug

Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)

#60

Post by jjk166 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35
soVeryTired wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found myself thinking about multiplication tables in the shower today. I think you can get away with knowing the tables for 2, 3, and 7 really well. The rest is just tricks: 4: 2x twice 5: add a zero and divide by 2 6: a 3x followed by a 2x 8: 2x three times 9: 3x twice Beyond that, it’s repetition of those tricks, plus the distributive property of multiplication over addition.

Nice, though I still prefer the trick for 9 that I was taught: 9: 10x, then subtract once.

Another: for X from 1 to 10, the digits of 9x will add to 9, and the leading digit will be x-1. You can do this visually by putting up all your fingers and putting down the Xth one - this splits your fingers into two groups, the first is the tens place digit while the second is the ones place digit.
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