Parents say new way to teach math doesn't add up

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Parents say new way to teach math doesn't add up
Sunday, June 10, 2007

By KATHLEEN CARROLL, STAFF WRITER

High-achieving parents, worried that non-traditional math lessons will
cause their children to fall behind, are demanding a return to the
basics.

That scenario is playing out in Ridgewood and across the nation, as
parents, educators and the nation's mathematicians clash over reform
math programs -- what critics call "fuzzy math." The debate has become
particularly heated as test after test shows U.S. students lag
children in Singapore and China.

Reform math allows students to solve problems however they wish and
uses everyday language -- think "combine" instead of "add." It
encourages independent reasoning and computation using familiar
objects, so students may solve word problems by drawing a series of
circles and counting up the answer. And it is unsettling to many
parents, who memorized multiplication tables and slogged through
arithmetic worksheets when they were in school.

For parent and veteran teacher Sarah-Kate Maskin, the worries began
when her 8-year-old daughter didn't know how to write out a
subtraction problem.

"That's not taught," she said. "They teach mental math strategies for
breaking apart numbers. I'm not interested in my kindergarten-through-
fifth-grader being a deep mathematical thinker. I want them to know
their multiplication facts, their long division."

Echoing ongoing math battles in New York City and Seattle, nearly 200
Ridgewood parents have signed a petition demanding the district adopt
a traditional curriculum. Board of Education meetings and Internet
message boards feature lengthy math debates. Many families are
ordering materials online and hosting afternoon math classes at home,
or signing children up for private tutoring on the weekends.

Elizabeth Gnall uses workbooks from top-scoring Singapore's math
curriculum with her two school-aged children, who also attend a local
Kumon tutoring center. The computation practice and worksheets from
both programs allow for mastery and success in small bites, and that
builds confidence, she said. Better yet, her children enjoy it.

"I know reformists like to call it drill and kill," she said, "but I
look at it as drill for skill."

Reform math programs are used in more than 100 New Jersey school
districts, popular among educators because skills are learned in real-
world contexts and higher-order thinking is encouraged. They are also
intended to have a low intimidation factor and may be more accessible
to students -- particularly girls and African-American students -- who
are less likely to enroll in higher-level math courses.

A report last year by the influential National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics struck a new balance in the reform-versus-tradition
debate: The council said teachers should focus on math facts and
mastering a limited set of skills each year. That was a retreat from
its 1989 recommendations, which said instruction should instill math-
literate reasoning on a variety of topics while allowing students to
use calculators or draw pictures to solve problems as they wished.

No matter the curriculum, improving math education in the United
States is a front-and-center goal. Citing global competitiveness, the
Bush administration last year assembled a new panel to study the
teaching of math. Math Now, a new $250 million federal grant program,
will fund high-level math instruction that follows the panel's
recommendations, expected sometime this year. In New Jersey and 28
other states, educators are working to make high school math education
more rigorous, part of the national American Diploma Project.

Many mathematicians and engineers have explicitly declared certain
reform programs as fundamentally flawed and overly simplistic. A
leading critic, research mathematician and Stanford University
professor R. James Milgram, says programs such as Everyday Math, and
Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (known as TERC), both of
which are used in Ridgewood, are too reliant on calculators and don't
thoroughly teach students basic number facts or functions.

"Our view is colored by what we see," Milgram explained. "Students are
coming to the university worse prepared than any time we can
remember. ... They simply cannot do math at the university level."

Any instruction that fails to strike a balance between skill-
development and greater understanding is insufficient, no matter what
the extreme, said Joseph Rosenstein, a math professor at Rutgers
University who reviewed the national recommendations and helped write
New Jersey's math instruction standards. He recalled college calculus
classes in which his students entered with top-notch computational
skills but were unable to extrapolate their skills or grasp numerical
logic, patterns or meaning.

"One of the themes of the math wars is that some people argue all for
skills, and some argue all for understanding," he said. "Everybody
agrees that both are important. You can't apply math without skills.
But simply being able to carry out rote procedures won't enable to you
to carry out the sorts of procedures you'll need in the future."

That delicate balance was on display last week in Matthew Connelly's
third-grade classroom at Travell School in Ridgewood, which uses TERC
Investigations materials.

A morning math lesson on volume included visual cues and group
discussion, individual on-paper arithmetic, and problem-solving with
hand-held objects. Connelly asked his students to imagine a box that
would fit 32 cubes, and students chatted together to determine its
dimensions.

Then, they worked in small groups, building boxes out of 32 colored
cubes or doing more abstract computation on paper. Some students chose
to solve problems using addition, while others were using their
multiplication skills.

"You know what I like? We're using our multiplication skills to think
about this math," Connelly told the class. "It's not just shapes, it's
multiplication too."

Despite the controversy, the district does not plan to stop using
TERC. This summer, Travell teachers will review and prepare to use an
updated edition that includes more traditional arithmetic practice.
The school will also include parents in that conversation, as well as
draw input from surveys sent home this year.

"We want for [students] to accurately and efficiently get the answer,
but also to go beyond that," said Regina Botsford, assistant
superintendent for curriculum. "The problems of tomorrow are complex.
They will need new and novel solutions, to problems for which the
solution is not immediately obvious."

E-mail: carroll.TakeThisOut@northjersey.com

Dom <DRosa.DeleteThis@teikyopost.edu> wrote:
>High-achieving parents, worried that non-traditional math lessons will
>cause their children to fall behind,

Fall behind what? If all kids are studying the same thing, why would
the high achievers fall behind.

If they mean "fall behind Singapore", well that is what the old way of
teaching caused. We didn't suddenly fall behind Singapore the year
before TIMMS in 1983, any more than we suddenly fell way behind Russia
when Sputnik was launched in 1957.

We fell behind in part because unlike other nations we do NOT have a
centrally-planned public education system, so that even if one school
does it rights, many others won't. We fell behind because in order to
be inclusive of all kids (and to avoid discrimination that tended to
track kids based on skin color or gender instead of on ability, we did
not track some kids faster than others).

>are demanding a return to the basics.\

But of course they don't know that "the basics" are a solution to the
problem, or even what "the problem" is.

>That scenario is playing out in Ridgewood and across the nation, as
>parents, educators and the nation's mathematicians clash over reform
>math programs -- what critics call "fuzzy math." The debate has become
>particularly heated as test after test shows U.S. students lag
>children in Singapore and China.

Of course we lagged even before "fuzzy math" was proposed. and
probably lag by less today than we did then.

>Reform math allows students to solve problems however they wish

They have to be algorithms that solve the problem, though.

>and uses everyday language -- think "combine" instead of "add."

This hearkens back to what I said - that the "old-fashioned" methods
stated problems already in formulaic English, so that kids did not
need to understand the problem in order to mechanically solve it.

>It encourages independent reasoning and computation using familiar
>objects, so students may solve word problems by drawing a series of
>circles and counting up the answer. And it is unsettling to many
>parents, who memorized multiplication tables and slogged through
>arithmetic worksheets when they were in school.

.... and made us last among nations because many of them learned to
hate and to avoid math.


>"That's not taught," she said. "They teach mental math strategies for
>breaking apart numbers. I'm not interested in my kindergarten-through-
>fifth-grader being a deep mathematical thinker. I want them to know
>their multiplication facts, their long division."

Note the words. She is NOT a fan of Herman's teaching of concepts.
She wants her kids to learn to be calculators, and not mathematicians.

>Elizabeth Gnall uses workbooks from top-scoring Singapore's math
>curriculum with her two school-aged children,

This is because of the myth that it is Singapore's curriculum, and not
its culture, and the structure of its educational system which is
intended to mass-produce educational-clones rather than thinking
individuals. These parents don't really want educational-clones; they
want "winners".

>Many mathematicians and engineers have explicitly declared certain
>reform programs as fundamentally flawed and overly simplistic.

And many mathematicians have labeled the other mathematicians as being
fundamentally flawed and overly simplistic.

>"Our view is colored by what we see," Milgram explained. "Students are
>coming to the university worse prepared than any time we can
>remember. ... They simply cannot do math at the university level."

Which is completely false. We are simply expecting MORE students to
come to university able to do a HIGHER level of math at the university
level than we expected 50 years ago, when most college students
usually took algebra and not calculus.

>Any instruction that fails to strike a balance between skill-
>development and greater understanding is insufficient, no matter what
>the extreme, said Joseph Rosenstein, a math professor at Rutgers
>University who reviewed the national recommendations and helped write
>New Jersey's math instruction standards.

Note that this IS a mathematician that helped write the standards.
Not the fairy tale of Hermans that mathematicians have been displaced
by "educationists" who have no skill in math.

lojbab