Another Example of how Liberals are Destroying this Country

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Consumer Reports

Teaching with solipsism: New-new math not adding up

http://www.jewishworldreview.com --

PARENTS in New York City have begun pounding at the schoolhouse doors, demanding that local educators cease and desist in their efforts to afflict children with something called "constructivist" mathematics -- also known as the "new-new math."

Here's the theory behind the pedagogical pet rock: Kids learn best not from teachers, but from each other. They speak the same language, employ the same intellectual models, share the same view of the world. That being the case, teachers ought to seek out one bright kid, pass on a few concepts and wait for the insight to trickle from the smart kid's brain to all the others.

You can find concrete evidence of this thinking in many classrooms. You'll notice that desks no longer are arrayed in rows. Instead, instructors group them in clusters of four or six, so kids can look at each other while the teacher yawps from some nearby chalkboard.

The other lynchpin of the new-new math is the notion that schools can't teach unless they first pump students full of self-esteem. It's no secret that youngsters seldom feel a surge of fulfillment when working through grinding exercises in addition, subtraction, multiplication, division or a combination of the above -- especially if teachers expect them to get each and every cipher right. Who has fond recollections of word problems involving trains moving from far-flung stations at different speeds?

So constructivist math suggests an alternative: Heap praise on kids if they get close.

Theorists say precision matters less to young minds than developing comfort with their ordinals and cardinals. The new-new crew thus recommends letting students "discover" their own personal methods for performing simple calculations. Don't make them memorize tables. Stimulate their imaginations. Urge them to develop "strategies" and "models"-- in effect, to create homemade methods for grasping truths that appeared only after lifetimes of arduous labor by such geniuses as Euclid, Newton, Leibniz, Euler and Reimann.

Let's pick this apart for a moment. A few years ago, educators were enamored with a concept called "attention deficit disorder." Every time a restive child fired a spitball toward the blackboard, yawned or played a practical joke, educators would diagnose ADD -- a condition considered annoying, but treatable.

That was then. These days, educators assume every kid has ADD -- that the average child has the attention span of a gecko on a hotplate and that this crisis in concentration demands an unprecedented approach to instruction.

So what is the secret of this new method? Teachers encourage kids to estimate, not calculate -- and to feel a sense of intellectual hauteur even though they cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide. This is ebonics with an equals sign.

Another through-the-looking-glass feature: It used to be that kids learned about sex from the kids next door and received mathematical instruction from trained adults. Now, it's just the opposite. You learn about condoms from the teacher and about deMorgan's Theorem from Johnny and Jane.

We thus have replaced teaching with solipsism: The kids are the fountains of their own wisdom, and teachers are there merely to facilitate the maieutic magic. California adopted the approach wholesale in the 1980s, and its mathematical achievement scores collapsed. Parents rebelled, and the new-new fad began to fade. Now, New Yorkers are getting a bellyful, and parents are no happier there than were their Golden State counterparts.

There's one final relevant aspect of New-Newism: The curriculum is designed to address the failure to teach mathematics to girls and ethnic minorities -- not by creating high expectations, but by abandoning standards. David Klein of California State University at Northridge wrote last year in a Brookings Institution study, "The view that African Americans, Latinos and girls have 'learning styles' ... different from the learning style of white males ... has contributed to the creation and widespread use of low quality mathematics textbooks and curricula in the U.S."

It has come to this. Americans once counted on schools to imbue students with knowledge and ambition. Teachers routinely challenged youngsters and scolded, "You can do better than this!" That's increasingly becoming the exception rather than the rule, though. We have replaced elitism with dull uniformity; rigor with smile buttons; pride in accomplishment with pride in showing up.

And there's a price to pay. Ask yourself: Who would you prefer to have operating on you -- a surgeon driven by perfectionism or one taught through the years that exactitude isn't everything, and that even the most miserable performance is worth a gold star and a hug?



-- Chemtrail Pilot (Ispr@y.u), April 25, 2001

Answers

Trickle down mathmatics.

Well, at least my kids are the smart one's at the top of the heap.

-- Chemtrail Pilot (Ispr@y.u), April 25, 2001.


New new math:

2+2=4 ... Correct, but unimaginative!

2+2=3 or 5 ... NICE WORK! That's a really good answer!

2+2 = 2 or 6 ... Good Guess but you're just a little bit off!

2+2 = 1 or 7 ... That's a really good attempt.

-- They'reDumbingOur (Children@Down.com), April 25, 2001.


Actually the theory for the new math curriculum is that since programs like Mathematica can compute better than almost every human being, all math problems should be story problems. However, this does not work unless the students are trained to use mathematical software. The other issue is that understanding story problems entails understanding a second subject besides the math for each problem. The estimation is to help detect typing errors.

-- dandelion (golden@pleurisy.plant), April 25, 2001.

"This is ebonics with an equals sign."

To an to be for. (?)

-- Sam (wtrmkr52@aol.com), April 25, 2001.


I'm really not familiar with the new-new math program in detail, but the author seems to feel that guesstimating is a REPLACEMENT for understanding how to obtain the correct figure. There are good reasons for teaching guesstimation. For instance, let's say one is presented a situation wherein one must subtract $1.69 from $2.00. [I've seen store clerks need paper and pencil to do such things.] Guesstimating, one could easily change the problem in one's head to $2.00 - $1.70 and easily discern an answer of $.30. One could even see that one had added a penny to the amount to be subtracted and must now correct the answer by that 1. If the application of a method isn't taught to educators before they're put in a situation wherein they must use the method, they're going to do a piss-poor job of it. If New York intends to institute new-new-math, there should be mandatory training of educators to accommodate the program.

I would agree completely that kids are being labeled and treated ADD when they shouldn't be.

Regarding going back to strict memorization, I don't think that's the answer. My almost 88 year old mother can STILL recite the multiplication table, but she has NO clue how multiplication fits into her life or when to use multiplication versus division. In addition to computerized software that combines math with reading, history, music, and other subjects, many school systems have shown great success in coordinating timing of lessons between departments. In this way, a student for whom music comes easily can see that math isn't isolated from music, but an integral part of it. I would much prefer children be taught application of mathematics than teach them to a test and have them stumble through life because real life wasn't going to be on the test.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), April 25, 2001.



All kids should be soda jerks for awhile. In my part time job during high school, I got to the point where subtracting the price from the money tendered and counting the change back to the customer was rote - the answers just kind of popped into my head automatically because of all the repetition. Nowadays of course, the cash registers do it automatically for the clerks so they don't have to think.

-- Ron

-- Ron (rkba_4all@yahoo.com), April 25, 2001.


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