Is there any way out of that site's pagination? Even the print button doesn't help.
Blocking JS on the site works for me.
That works, thanks. Pairs well with Firefox's Reader Mode.
Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
31–40 of 106 posts
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#32it’s so simple/so very simple/that only a child can do it!
(and remember kids, base 8 is just like base 10, really — if you’re missing two fingers)
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#33This 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…
My cousin and her late husband are dentists. They spent years helping the Native Americans with dental work. During frequent discussions, she mentioned that it's sad that they have bad dental hygiene. Ultimately what she said was, "It's really difficult to convince someone they should focus on brushing their teeth, when really the sole idea occupying their mind is if they are going to get to eat the next day." So many things could be solved so effortlessly, by us spending so little money on basic things.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may very well be correct; however, I can see some other possibilities: - The scores don't effectively measure learning. - The need to prepare students for tests undermines the ability to try different teaching approaches. - Scores don't change overall but the distribution of scores change. - The distribution of scores don't change but the demographics of the students in a given part of the distribution change. -…
I don't understand how someone can learn math, yet be unable to solve math problems on a test. In my 16 years of education, I saw a consistent 1:1 correlation with learning the material and doing correspondingly well on the tests. That consistency included myself - when I learned the material, I'd ace the test. When I didn't learn it, I failed the test. There wasn't any magical "learned but didn't test well" going on…
You're assuming that "math problems" is a well-defined set of problems. But depending on what you want to test/teach, there's also going to be different problems that students will do well on.
As an example: do you consider solving 579×46 quickly a "math problem"? I will solve it (relatively) quickly, since I was thought how to solve that exact problem algorithmicaly.
But if you hadn't thaught that algorithm (you could argue that nowadays we have calculators for this) then it would probably take you a bit longer to derive some form of this algorithm. But it doesn't necessarily imply that you're bad at math, just that you have not practiced this exact task before.
In my experience, doing really well in tests requires more adaption to the tasks of the tests than actual understanding. Most tests are limited on time, and stress does not exactly help you to deal creatively with completely new tasks.
Note that I don't want to say that teaching algorithms is bad. It surely helps to do some basic calculation without having to think much about it. I just want to point out that the tests are often testing a specific understanding of math, and different teaching methods often also differ in their goal of what they want students to learn well.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#35My 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…
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.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#36Within 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
That was how I was taught, in Europe, decades ago. We didn't call it Singapore Math, we just called it Maths. And we used Cuisenaire Rods instead of bar charts.
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Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand how someone can learn math, yet be unable to solve math problems on a test. In my 16 years of education, I saw a consistent 1:1 correlation with learning the material and doing correspondingly well on the tests. That consistency included myself - when I learned the material, I'd ace the test. When I didn't learn it, I failed the test. There wasn't any magical "learned but didn't test well" going on…
You’re speaking only of yourself and while you should be very happy you don’t suffer from any of a multitude of disorders, it’s highly classist and disrespectful to assume that nobody else else. Consider anxiety disorders. There’s a crystal clear, fully scientifically proven reason that some can know the material but fail to perform on a test. Think more. It helps.
> highly classist
What do "disorders" have to do with class? At best, being from a lower socio economic class could put you at risk for whichever disorders you have in mind, but they aren't synonymous. At least, not in my mind.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#38I still believe New Maths is a great idea.
The main problem was that most teachers didn't get it, and so couldn't teach it. And parents were angry their kids were learning math that they couldn't understand.
So it was an implementation issue. The concept was sound.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#39I 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.
Re: Whatever Happened to New Math? (1990)
#40That 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 the system of one generic teacher talking at 30+ kids with increasingly heterogeneous experiences confined in a room and sitting at desks. It's a stupid problem.
The concrete math and geometry you learn from things like music, cooking, carpentry, navigation, engine repair, gambling, and building a basic physical experimental apparatus could take a child "up" to differential calculus in less than a couple of years. We have to look at who becomes a teacher and whether they are transmitting their tangible skills to students, or if they are themselves physically helpless talking heads for a received curriculum.
Today, I meet ostensibly educated people and their defining characteristic is they have been institutionalized. Whether it was in grad school or prison is just a matter of taste.