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Barry Garelick, via email:
By way of introduction, I am neither mathematician nor mathematics teacher, but I majored in math and have used it throughout my career, especially in the last 17 years as an analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My love of and facility with math is due to good teaching and good textbooks. The teachers I had in primary and secondary school provided explicit instruction and answered students’ questions; they also posed challenging problems that required us to apply what we had learned. The textbooks I used also contained explanations of the material with examples that showed every step of the problem solving process.
I fully expected the same for my daughter, but after seeing what passed for mathematics in her elementary school, I became increasingly distressed over how math is currently taught in many schools.
Optimistically believing that I could make a difference in at least a few students’ lives, I decided to teach math when I retire. I enrolled in education school about two years ago, and have only a 15-week student teaching requirement to go. Although I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for with respect to educational theories, I was still dismayed at what I found in my mathematics education courses.
In class after class, I have heard that when students discover material for themselves, they supposedly learn it more deeply than when it is taught directly. Similarly, I have heard that although direct instruction is effective in helping students learn and use algorithms, it is allegedly ineffective in helping students develop mathematical thinking. Throughout these courses, a general belief has prevailed that answering students’ questions and providing explicit instruction are “handing it to the student” and preventing them from “constructing their own knowledge”–to use the appropriate terminology. Overall, however, I have found that there is general confusion about what “discovery learning” actually means. I hope to make clear in this article what it means, and to identify effective and ineffective methods to foster learning through discovery.
Garelick’s part ii on Discovery learning can be found here.
Related: The Madison School District purchases Singapore Math workbooks with no textbooks or teacher guides. Much more on math here.
Heather Peske It’s nearly universal: Teachers with master’s degrees almost always get paid more than teachers without. The presumption is that the master’s degree signals a greater level of knowledge and skill. But what if I told you that aspiring elementary math teachers who go through graduate-level teacher prep are often less prepared than teachers who go […]
Chad Aldeman: My favorite paper on this comes from Dan Goldhaber, Malcolm Wolff, and Tim Daly, who looked at how accurate early measures of achievement are in predicting longer-term academic outcomes. In a 2021 paper, they used data from North Carolina, Massachusetts and Washington State and found, “consistent and very strong relationships between 3rd grade test […]
Corrinne Hess: ….. a bill will be introduced soon that will include math screeners to provide testing and individualized plans to help struggling students catch up. “This bill is not going to be the full solution to the problem, but I think it’s going to be a very good first step in addressing a very […]
Benjamin Solomon: The refrain has been broadcast widely: New York math achievement, as measured on a respected national test, is in the dumps. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 37% of New York 4th graders scored proficient relative to 39% overall for the nation.1 The situation was worse for 8th graders, with only 26% […]
Families For New York: A guest post by Professor Benjamin Solomon on the multiple omissions and inaccuracies in the newly released NY math briefs and why they should be withdrawn Today I am sharing a guest post by Benjamin, an Associate Professor in School Psychology at the University of Albany, about what is wrong with the […]
Joanne Jacobs Summary: Teacher training at a well-respected university focused on social justice, cultural relevance, students’ psychology — but not how to teach math, an engineer turned math teacher tells Holly Korbey in an interview. “Yellow Heights,” as he calls himself, is the author of Unbalanced: Memoir of an Immigrant Math Teacher. Yellow Heights was […]
Corrinne Hess: State Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay, was one of the authors of the reading bill known as Act 20. He says he now wants to create similar legislation for math. During a press conference on Sept. 10, Kitchens said a bill will be introduced soon that will include math screeners to provide testing […]
Wall Street Journal: Since 2013 NAEP math scores have dropped 11 points for eighth-graders and five points for fourth-graders—and the declines are steepest for the lowest-performing students. Twelfth-grade scores have dropped six points. Thirty-nine percent of eighth-graders and 45% of twelfth-graders scored below “basic” proficiency in 2024. Scores were trending up before 2013, so what […]
Jordana Hunter and Nick Parkinson Adults use maths every day, whether it’s to compare grocery prices, pay bills or interpret statistics in the news. Adults with weak maths skills are more likely to struggle with employment, have poor mental healthand suffer homelessness. When students feel anxious about maths, it can impede their performance. While a little stress […]
Anna Stokke: Powerful comments from @ToddTruitt76508 to Maryland State BOE. Why does Carrie Wright get it for reading, but NOT math?“staff cited NCTM’s 2023 fluency position paper…that cites an opinion article of the Lucy Calkins of math, Jo Boaler who has proudly proclaimed she never learned her times tables”youtube.com/live/qhPADx_75… ——— More:
Lee Fang: These foundations are eliminating middle school algebra and promoting “numberless math,” which is leaving students paying the price. Jim Simons’ mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After […]
Rick Hess: enjoyed reading your recent discussion with Alex Baron, “How Much Autonomy Should Teachers Have Over Instructional Materials?” In particular, I was struck by your skepticism about whether “high-quality instructional materials” are always high quality. I have a lot of sympathy for your observation that: “A lot of these determinations seem to depend heavily […]
Anna Stokke: It is often desirable to explain why standard methods work using pictures and blocks but these concrete materials should not be used as actual strategies for working through arithmetic problems – our ancestors moved beyond such primitive techniques centuries ago. These convoluted strategies take up so much time that children are still working […]
Anna Stokke: I’ve been reviewing Canadian math curricula (standards) this week. Here’s a BC grade 5 outcome titled “multiplication & division facts to 100.” As if this all weren’t bad enough, we have “memorization of facts is not intended at this level.” Grade 5! Wish I could unsee this. —— 2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin […]
Link: The recently released New York math briefs (found here) are not scientific and describe questionable practices. Many of these practices have been shown through decades of rigorous research to be ineffective, especially for students struggling with mathematics. These briefs should be withdrawn. This letter (read below) outlines serious concerns regarding grave omissions and inaccuracies in […]
Sara Randazzo: Last fall, Harvard expanded its entry-level math offerings, with a new version of its introductory calculus course that meets five days a week instead of the usual four. Students are given a skills test to determine whether they need the extended course, Kelly said. The extra time each week is devoted to reviewing […]
Ulcca Joshi Hansen and Dave Kung: What Maryland students need is an approach that focuses on conceptual understanding, while building fluency with a few core procedures — exactly the approach laid out in the proposal. Here’s what needs to change to prepare Maryland students with math skills to thrive in today’s world: 1. Update math content: When every […]
Corrine Hess: The difference, Sturmer said, is that Winskill focused on teaching math — and made sure its teachers were using the latest evidence-based practices, not just teaching it the same way they learned when they were in school. “It comes down to teaching the why behind mathematics and how things work,” he said. “Not […]
Madison Education Partnership: When we dig deeper on summative and formative exams, we find extreme inequities in performance by student demographic group and in specific content areas. For example, in 6th grade, the typical student from a low-income family is two or more grade levels behind in algebra and in numbers and operations while the […]
Bridie Smith: Compounding matters, the report released on Sunday also found one in four teachers lacked confidence teaching grade 5 and 6 maths, while many teachers expressed concern about their colleagues’ abilities. “Maths in primary schools is just languishing,” said Grattan Institute education program director and report lead author Dr Jordana Hunter. “We need to […]
Corrine Hess: Almost 25 percent of Wisconsin fourth graders lack basic math knowledge NCTQ evaluated 22 elementary teacher prep programs in Wisconsin to determine if they dedicate enough time to key math content topics and math pedagogy. The report found 14 percent of the state’s programs earned an “A+” or an “A” by dedicating at least […]
Teacher Prep Review: Unfortunately, many elementary students in the United States do not receive adequate math instruction. Nearly a quarter of fourth graders, over 850,000 children in the U.S.4—roughly the entire population of San Francisco—lack basic math knowledge and skills, such as locating numbers on a number line or subtracting multidigit whole numbers.5 Improving math […]
John Richards and Tingting Zhang Scores on international tests have been falling. Without better teaching, students will be ill-prepared for a data-driven world. Canada’s declining K-12 education system is sending out worrying warning signals. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Canadian students ranked in the top 10 among OECD countries. But that doesn’t mean all is […]
Anna Stokke: Wanted to share a video of a presentation to a public school board in Northern California about ‘Math Fact Fluency’ given by a friend and colleague: The main presenter — David Margulies — is a parent and former IBM Ph.D research staff member who worked in materials science his entire career and has […]
more. 2007 math forum audio video Connected Math Discovery Math Singapore Math Remedial math Madison’s most recent Math Task Force When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Greg Ashman: Thousands of primary school students will be tested on their mathematics knowledge as part of a landmark NSW numeracy screening trial to be rolled out from next term. NSW will run the maths screening check for year 1 students across 150 public schools, testing about 5000 pupils on basic skills including counting, ordering […]
Christopher Harris Fewer students may be choosing to study higher-level maths for the HSC because they had been taught by primary school teachers who were “maths avoiders” and developed a negative attitude toward the subject, Sydney University vice-chancellor Professor Mark Scott has said. Scott made the comments at an Engineers Australia conference on Wednesday, an […]
Kayla Huynh: “There’s not a whole lot of research on it. But when I taught traditionally, it just wasn’t working. The kids were zoning out during the lesson part, and then I’d have to keep explaining it all over.” —- 2007 math forum audio video Connected Math Discovery Math Singapore Math Remedial math Madison’s most recent Math Task Force When A […]
Anna Stocke: US students’ poor performance on TIMSS has received much media attention. Canadian students scored worse than US students. Why is this not receiving the same degree of attention? —— 2007 math forum audio video Connected Math Discovery Math Singapore Math Remedial math Madison’s most recent Math Task Force When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of […]
Jill Barshay: You may have seen the headlines about the horrid math skills of U.S. children, but a few of the details in the 2023 TIMSS international test score report are fascinating. Let’s dig in with pictures.. —- 2007 math forum audio video Connected Math Discovery Math Singapore Math Remedial math Madison’s most recent Math Task Force When A Stands for […]
Dr. Darja Barr, Dr. Jim Clark, Dr. James Currie, Dr. Payman Eskandari, Dr. Shakhawat Hossain, Dr. Narad Rampersad, Dr. Anna Stokke, Dr. Ross Stokke and Dr. Matthew Wiersma: “ai” summary: A review of references cited by Dr. Martha Koch found no credible support for her claims that recent amendments to Manitoba’s Teaching Certificates and Qualifications […]
Michael Zwaagstra: Remember when Manitoba teachers were once forbidden from giving zeroes to students who didn’t hand in assignments? At that time, even docking marks for late work was strongly discouraged. Unsurprisingly, this approach failed miserably. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that this policy resulted in students choosing not to hand […]
Corrinne Hess Changes to UW-Madison’s School of Education math requirements Steffen Lempp, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says over the last decade, the School of Education has changed how prospective K-8 teachers are taught math content to fully prepare them to teach children in the subject. The UW-Madison math department used to […]
Barry Garelick and JR Wilson: From the foreword by Paul A. Kirschner, Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology – Open University of the Netherlands; Guest Professor – Thomas More University of Applied Sciences “This book will, hopefully, provide an arsenal of tools and techniques to break through this downward spiral in teaching and learning math. First off, it […]
via Anna Stokke: Distressing changes Re: Teachers need subject expertise (Think Tank, Nov. 12) I’m writing, as a parent and as an educator, in support of my colleague Anna Stokke’s Monday op-ed. Having spent two decades teaching post-secondary students in Manitoba, I am distressed, to say the least, to hear about the revisions to Manitoba’s […]
Anna Stokke In answer to Martha Koch’s opinion piece, “absolutely,” and I say that as a scientist with 40 years of experience in the biology of behaviour, but the crackpot ideas of self-described “researchers” that have held sway for the last 30 years with respect to influencing educational policy are the least reliable basis for […]
Alberta Parents Union: We are urgently calling on Alberta to teach math teachers to teach math! That may seem like a silly request, but read on to find out which math-like-substance is being sold to teachers as “teaching math” now. It’s a perennial struggle in parent advocacy. Parents want to know the basics are being […]
Susan Edelman: Scores on Algebra 1 Regents exam plummeted by 14 percentage points at south Queens schools that used a controversial new curriculum teachers have blasted as “a complete disaster,” a superintendent revealed this week Josephine Van Ess, superintendent of Queens South High Schools, told parent leaders Wednesday that the 29 high schools under her watch, all […]
My mom cried during the SpaceX launch. She’s a math teacher. “So many people in the education world want to get rid of advanced math for equity. I’m sick of it. Without math, this [launch] can’t happen. Kids need to be allowed to dream.” Spot on, mom 🇺🇸pic.twitter.com/LsGvs9WM5O — Max Meyer (@mualphaxi) November 18, 2023 […]
Sharon Lurye: A few years ago she shifted her approach, turning to more direct explanation after finding a website on a set of evidence-based practices known as the science of math. “I could see how the game related to multiplication, but the kids weren’t making those connections,” said Stark, a math teacher in the suburbs […]
Wesley Crocket: Faculty members in the University of California (UC) system have begun to speak out against their campuses’ adoption of lower math standards in order to bolster diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The controversy surrounds a policy enacted by a UC committee in 2020, which changed the admissions requirements for high school applicants in […]
Noah Smith: “The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.” — John Dewey A couple of weeks ago, Armand Domalewski wrote a guest post for Noahpinion about how the new California Math Framework threatened to dumb down math education in the state — for example, by forbidding kids from taking algebra before high school: […]
Lucy Kellaway: Some years ago, shortly before I left the Financial Times, I gave a talk at a literary event in Oxford. Put up your hand, I said to the audience, if you are useless at maths — whereupon the arms of around a third of them shot into the air. At the time, I […]
Summer Allen: A new study finds that high school students identify more with math if they see their math teacher treating everyone in the class equitably, especially in racially diverse schools. The study by researchers at Portland State University, Loyola University Chicago and the University of North Texas was published in the journal Sociology of […]
Ellen Gamerman: On RussianMathTutors.com, a site promoting a Soviet-era style of math instruction, a sample question involves Masha, a mom who bakes a batch of unmarked pies: three rice, three bean and three cherry. The student must determine how Masha can find a cherry pie “by biting into as few tasteless pies as possible.” While […]
Sumit Agarwal, Andrea Presbitero, André F. Silva, and Carlo Wix: We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify the cross-subsidy from naive to sophisticated consumers in retail financial markets. Using granular data on the near universe of credit card accounts in the United States, we find that sophisticated consumers profit from reward […]
Sarah Mervosh: It’s just after lunchtime, and Dori Montano’s fifth-grade math class is running on a firm schedule. In one corner of the classroom, Ms. Montano huddles with a small group of students, working through a lesson about place value: Is 23.4 or 2.34 the bigger number? Nearby, other students collaborate to solve a “math […]
Joe Hong: At the heart of the wrangling lies a broad agreement about at least one thing:The way California public schools teach math isn’t working. On national standardized tests, California ranks in the bottom quartile among all states and U.S. territories for 8th grade math scores. Yet for all the sound and fury, the proposed framework, about 800-pages […]
Signatories: 1,105 as of November 5, 2021 California is on the verge of politicizing K-12 math in a potentially disastrous way. Its proposed Mathematics Curriculum Framework is presented as a step toward social justice and racial equity, but its effect would be the opposite—to rob all Californians, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who always suffer most […]
The Economist: America has a maths problem. Its pupils have ranked poorly in international maths exams for decades. In 2018, American 15-year-olds ranked 25th in the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries. American adults ranked fourth-from-last in numeracy when compared with other rich countries. As many as 30% of American adults are comfortable only […]
Jacey Fortin: If everything had gone according to plan, California would have approved new guidelines this month for math education in public schools. But ever since a draft was opened for public comment in February, the recommendations have set off a fierce debate over not only how to teach math, but also how to solve […]
Lee Fang: During an internal presentation at Facebook on Wednesday, the company debuted features for Facebook Workplace, an intranet-style chat and office collaboration product similar to Slack. On Facebook Workplace, employees see a stream of content similar to a news feed, with automatically generated trending topics based on what people are posting about. One of […]
Ben Eisen & Adrienne Roberts: Mr. Jones, now 22 years old, walked out with a gray Accord sedan with heated leather seats. He also took home a 72-month car loan that cost him and his then-girlfriend more than $500 a month. When they split last year and the monthly payment fell solely to him, it […]
Charlotte Yang: Chinese high school students generally outperform their western peers at math — at least, that’s what many in the country believe. That assumption was shattered Monday, when China placed a mediocre sixth at the 2019 Romanian Master of Mathematics (RMM), a major math competition for pre-university students. The U.S. won the championship for […]
Math from Three to Seven: A question of culture When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley (in the late 1980s), it was under- stood, among my American classmates, that the Eastern Europeans were simply better. They weren’t genetically superior; indeed, many of my Amer- ican classmates, myself included, were themselves descended from Eastern […]
James Tanton: It is astounding to me that mathematics – of all school subjects – elicits such potent emotional reaction when “reform” is in the air. We’ve seen the community response to the Common Core State Standards in the U.S., the potency of the Back to Basics movement in Alberta, Canada, and the myriad of […]
Chris Papst: Project Baltimore analyzed 2017 state test scores released this fall. We paged through 16,000 lines of data and uncovered this: Of Baltimore City’s 39 High Schools, 13 had zero students proficient in math. Digging further, we found another six high schools where one percent tested proficient. Add it up – in half the […]
Natasha Singer & Danielle Ivory: Silicon Valley is going all out to own America’s school computer-and-software market, projected to reach $21 billion in sales by 2020. An industry has grown up around courting public-school decision makers, and tech companies are using a sophisticated playbook to reach them, The New York Times has found in a […]
Karen Rivedal: “Kids aren’t going to be able to take risks and push themselves academically, without having a trusting support network there,” said Lindsay Maglio, principal of Lindbergh Elementary School, where some teachers improved on traditional get-to-know-you exercises in the first few weeks of school by adding more searching questions, and where all school staff […]
Amber Walker: MMSD highlighted the success of the new math curriculum in its annual report, released last July. The report said the first cohort of schools using Bridges saw an eight-point increase in math proficiency scores and nine-point gains in math growth in one school year on the spring Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) exam […]
Slashdot.org: “I have two daughters now who are perfectly good in math, but they had one or two bad math teachers and they are done. That’s what happens to girls. They walk away from tech and science. And there’s something going on that is not just about the girls. There’s something going on with how […]
Chris Papst: A Project Baltimore investigation has found five Baltimore City high schools and one middle school do not have a single student proficient in the state tested subjects of math and English. We sat down with a teen who attends one of those schools and has overcome incredible challenges to find success. Related: Math […]
James Wollack and Michael Fish: Major Findings CORE-Plus students performed significantly less well on math placement test and ACT-M than did traditional students Change in performance was observed immediately after switch Score trends throughout CORE-Plus years actually decreased slightly Inconsistent with a teacher learning-curve hypothesis CORE-AP students fared much better, but not as well as […]
Kevin Carey: The problem, from a regulatory standpoint, is that they borrow a lot of money to obtain the degree — over $78,000 on average, according to the university. The total tuition is $62,593. And because it’s a graduate program, students can also borrow the full cost of their living expenses from the federal government, […]
Cory Koedel and Morgan Polikoff, via a kind Dan Dempsey email: Textbooks are one of the most widely used educational inputs, but remarkably little is known about their effects on student learning. This report uses data collected from elementary schools in California to estimate the impacts of mathematics textbook choices on student achievement. We study […]
Madison School District Administration (PDF): Project Description: MMSD has provided funding to support coursework in the content and teaching knowledge of middle school teachers of math. Toward that goal, a partnership was formed back in 2010 between the District, the UW-Madison School of Education, the UW- Madison Department of Mathematics, and the University of Wisconsin […]
Two of our overriding efforts in Lower Education in recent years have been: 1) raising the low math and reading scores of black and Hispanic students, and 2) increasing the number of our high school and college graduates capable of employment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM}.
Very recently evidence has been allowed to surface pointing out that while students in the bottom 10% of academic performance have indeed improved, students in the top ten percent of academic performance have stagnated, where they have not dropped out from boredom. Related evidence now suggests that complacency with secondary public education in our more affluent suburbs may have been quite misplaced as well.
As Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum point out in their recent book, That Used To Be Us, “average is over.” That is to say, students in other cities (Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai) and countries (Finland, South Korea, Japan) take their educations so much more seriously than our students (and teachers) do that their economies are achieving gains on our own that are truly startling, if we take the time to notice.
If we are to retain good jobs, restart our manufacturing, and otherwise decide to compete seriously with others who seem to take both education and work more seriously than we have come to do, it might be wise to increase the interest of our students in STEM fields. According to the Kaiser Foundation, our students aged 8-18 are spending, on average, more than seven hours a day with electronic entertainment media.
Now of course we want our young people to buy our electronic entertainment hardware and software and we definitely want them to have a good time and be happy, but probably we would like them to be employable some day as well. Friedman and Mandelbaum point out that not only blue collar jobs and white collar jobs, but increasingly sophisticated professional work can be done to a high standard at a much lower cost in other countries than it can be done here.
Having our students spend 53 hours a week on their electronic entertainment media, while their high school homework tops out, in many cases, according to ACT, at three to four hours a week, is not a plan that will enable us to resume our competitive position in the world’s economies.
So perhaps we should assign students in high school 15 hours a week of homework (which would reduce their media time to a mere 38 hours a week) and pass on to them the information that if they don’t start working to a much much higher academic standard they will probably face a more depressing future in a greatly diminished nation than they currently imagine they will have.
But, is STEM enough? I remember the story told about a visit Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, made to the gleaming new Salk Laboratory in La Jolla. A young biologist, thrilled to be a guide to the Nobel Prize-winner, was very proud to be able to show off all the bright new spotless expensive state-of-the-art research equipment. When they finished the tour, the young man could not stop himself from saying, “Just think, Sir Alexander, with all this equipment, what you could have discovered!” And Sir Alexander said, “not penicillin.”
Because the discovery of penicillin relied on serendipity and curiosity. Fleming found some petri dishes contaminated by something that had come in, probably, through one of the dirty old badly-closed windows in his lab in England. Instead of washing the dishes so he could start over with them, as most scientists would have done, he asked himself what could have killed off those bacteria in the dishes. And a major breakthrough was made possible.
Just in passing, amid the rush for more STEM, I would like to put in a word for serendipity, which often fuels creativity of many kinds, by making possible the association of previously unrelated ideas and memories when in contact with a new fact or situation not deliberately sought out.
I argue that serendipity is more likely to occur and to be fruitful if our students also have a lot of experience with the ROOTS of civilization, that is, the history, literature, art, music, architecture and other fields which have provided the background and inspiration for so much that we find worthwhile in human life. Steve Jobs found his course in calligraphy useful when he came to think about Macintosh software, but there are countless examples of important discoveries and contributions that have been, at least in part, grounded in the ROOTS of civilized life. So let us push for more STEM, by all means, but if, in the process we neglect those ROOTS, our achievements will be fewer, and our lives will be the poorer as a result, IMHO.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
I know that I’m inviting trouble with this, but something that Reader wrote in a comment on another thread piqued my interest. I would like to discuss only a narrow question. Please don’t expand the discussion.
Writing about Everyday Math and Singapore, Reader wrote: “The fact is, the newer curricula stress more problem solving and discovery. That is, it’s doing more than a lot of older curricula.”
Here’s my question: can problem-solving be taught?
I mean this in the nicest possible way and I don’t have an answer myself. I’m not sure, I’m asking. Can people be taught or trained in problem-solving techniques or is it a talent that some people just natively have more than others? Problem solving requires a certain amount of creativity, doesn’t it? It can require a flexibility of perspective, curiosity, persistence, and pattern recognition. Can these things be taught or trained?
Related: Math Forum audio/video links.
The Economist: Look around the business world and two things stand out: the modern economy places an enormous premium on brainpower; and there is not enough to go round. But education inevitably matters most. How can India talk about its IT economy lifting the country out of poverty when 40% of its population cannot read? […]
Video and audio from Wednesday’s Math Forum are now available [watch the 80 minute video] [mp3 audio file 1, file 2]. This rare event included the following participants: Dick Askey (UW Math Professor) Faye Hilgart, Madison Metropolitan School District Steffen Lempp (MMSD Parent and UW Math Professor) Linda McQuillen, Madison Metropolitan School District Gabriele Meyer […]
Celeste Roberts: The problems with CMP go far beyond failing to reach parents. One big problem is that the edifice of mathematics is so huge. Think of how long it took mathematicians to discover all of it. When one tries to use the discovery paradigm as the sole model for math lessons, all of the […]
A reader forwarded this article: Jay Mathews, writing in the Washington Post: So when I found a new attack on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the nation’s leading association for math teachers, by a group of smart advocates, I saw a chance to bring some clarity to what we call the Math […]