Tuesday, April 26, 2016

How the ‘New Math’ is Ruining Education

How the ‘New Math’ is Ruining Education | Intellectual Takeout
"By now, you’ve probably seen some of the complaints on the internet about the “new math” being promoted by the Common Core Standards.
Many grade-school children—including, for instance, comedian Louis CK’s children—have come home with math homework that is virtually indecipherable to their parents.
The goal behind the new math, it seems, is to encourage children to not just solve their basic arithmetic problems, but to understand the concepts underlying them.
But according to a fascinating article by educator Martin Cothran titled “Why Johnny Can’t Add,” this approach is wrong-headed, and may even be causing America’s students to regress. 

As Cothran points out, the “old math” worked just fine, and was the basis for many innovations in the past two centuries.
...And where was Cothran’s father taught the math that paved the way for his career in aerospace engineering?
At a poor, one-room schoolhouse in the hills of South Carolina.
There, the students did not spend time learning why 10 + 5 = 15 or 9 – 7 = 2, and they had no fancy textbooks. 

According to Cothran’s father, “We just learned how to figure,” and left it at that. 
As was the experience of many of us, Cothran explains, “They memorized their addition and subtraction facts and their multiplication tables, and mastered long division through repeated drill and practice.” 
They simply memorized these things so that they would have a solid basis for the more conceptual math in later years.
...Now, with the new math, young students are being made to philosophize about 1+1 rather than simply memorizing that it equals 2. 
But as Cothran reminds us, the “new math” isn’t that new. 
He includes this other anecdote of his father:
“I told my dad once about the kind of math they were doing in the early 1990s in schools in Kentucky where I lived. ‘
That sounds like what they were doing in California in the 1950s,’ he said. 
‘In fact, if you give me a report from one of my engineers and told me he was educated in California, I’ll tell you how old he is.’ 
These engineers, he said, would use computers to compute complex calculations, but would make basic mistakes that no good mathematician should make.”
[Current proficiency levels in math for the nation and selected cities as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.]

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