AssortedStuff

In the current issue of ASCD Express, their online newsletter, a math teacher writes that it’s time for change in mathematics education.

He notes that we are still teaching “manipulative” math to students when both inexpensive technology and the internet make it possible to emphasize thinking skills instead of continuing to “focus our curricula on skills that we no longer need”.

We still need “pure” mathematics courses to prepare future mathematicians, engineers, and scientists, but for 90 percent of the population, we need to teach proper data mining and how to use that data to solve problems. We can’t quantify the skills we require from the next generation, and we can’t measure them by standardized tests, paper-and-pencil tests, or even “practicals”: we can only measure them by outcomes, which may be several years in the future.

However, it’s his closer that drives home an excellent point about more than just math.

We need to completely discard our perception of K–12 education and start fresh. If we are to remain a highly educated society, we must design the new curricula that will prepare our children with the critical-thinking skills necessary to solve not only our current problems, but also the ones yet to come.

Take a couple of minutes to read the whole thing.

ascd, change, education, math

President Obama on Wednesday announced a $250 million public-private effort to increase the number and quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to know that almost all the money is going to major colleges and universities who have pledged to train more than 10,000 new science and math teachers by 2015.

And what then? What happens when (if?) those teachers are hired by schools.

They will likely find a few things missing from this and every other education reform plan announced by the administration.

Things like modern lab equipment, computers, decent salaries, reasonable class sizes, not to mention ongoing training for current teachers.

Along with any proposals to change to anything about the curriculum and how it is delivered (a term that all by itself defines much that is wrong with the way society views teaching and learning).

So, where have we heard this before?

During the last panic proposal to improve math and science education, of course.

How did that work out?

education, math, reform, science, stem

I guess the problem with international assessments, the ones that show US kids doing poorly compared to their peers in other countries, is that we’re using the wrong ones.

At least according to the expert Jay Mathews interviewed.

He says the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)) is a bad one because it doesn’t fit “the way U.S. students are taught” and aligns to the “losing” side in the debate over how to teach math.

Which is to say that the designers of the PISA expect that schools are using curriculums that “make math instruction more relevant to the real world, and emphasize mathematical reasoning more than calculation”.

How dreadful to expect that kids should actually be able to understand and apply math concepts!

PISA includes questions like this one:

For a rock concert a rectangular field of size 100 m by 50 m was reserved for the audience. The concert was completely sold out and the field was full with all the fans standing. Which one of the following is likely to be the best estimate of the total number of people attending the concert?

A. 2000
B. 5000
C. 20000
D. 50000
E. 100000

Mathews thinks this is a bad question because it involves too many variables, such as the fact that “some people don’t like to get close to at concerts”.

Certainly it’s a lousy item when students are expected to locate the one and only “right” answer, according to the test writers who have been programmed to create just the right kinds of distracters (been there, done that :-).

However, it’s an excellent question when you want them to consider all those different, and sometimes messy, factors that clutter up problems here in the real world.

And if we also expect students to justify their answer, explain the logic they used to arrive at it, and use that interpretation as part of their assessment.

So, is the problem that we’re giving kids the wrong test?

Or that we’re not teaching to the right assessment?

assessment, jay mathews, math, standardized testing

In a recently posted TED Talk, mathematician and magician Arthur Benjamin says the K12 math curriculum is all wrong.

Instead of building a pyramid with Calculus at the top, students should be getting a good foundation in Statistics.

… I’m here to say, as a professor of mathematics, very few people use Calculus in a conscious, meaningful way in their day to day lives.

On the other hand, Statistics, that’s a subject that you could, and should, use on a daily basis.

I think if our students, our high school students, if all of the American citizens, knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn’t be in the economic mess we’re in today.

Listen to the professor. His talk is only 3 minutes but he makes far more sense than most math education “experts” you’ll hear.

education, math, reform, statistics, ted conference

Educators in this area want students to know that there’s no such thing as a “math gene”.

To counter the notion that mathematics ability is inscribed in DNA, school officials and corporate executives are waging a public relations campaign for the hearts and minds of the average math student. Their goal is to immerse more middle school students in algebra and toughen high school math requirements so graduates can compete for increasingly technical jobs. Their message: Advanced math is not only for rocket scientists.

Agreed. However, it’s going to take a whole lot more than rap videos and a “public relations campaign” aimed at persuading students to love math.

For one thing, the traditional curriculum in most American schools is far too repetitious in the early grades and does a poor job of incorporating technological tools.

Even worse, we spend way too much time teaching, drilling, and testing the mechanics of mathematics (or too often arithmetic) and not nearly enough on how the process is actually applied to real world situations.

Learning how to grind through algorithms rather than solving problems.

It’s no wonder so many students arrive at high school with both a distaste for math and a bad case of insecurity about their abilities in the subject.

curriculum, education, math, reform, stem

Unless you completely cut yourself off from all news sources yesterday (come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea), you knew that it was President Obama’s 100th day in office.

The media, especially the talking-heads channels, went overboard recounting every small detail of the last three months. Even a few important ones.

Coincidentally, in many of our elementary schools, we also celebrate the 100th day of the school year with counting and other math lessons related to the number one hundred.

So, which activity was actually worth the effort?

math, media, obama, teaching

Yesterday I tweeted a little piece of news fluff about 10 Congress critters voting against a resolution proclaiming March 14 as Pi Day, speculating (humorously, I hoped) that they might have no clue as to what pi is.

I was surprised to receive several very serious @replies, and one DM, with various versions of the sentiment that Congress had better things to do with it’s time. I’ve heard similar statements made by talking heads on television.

I disagree with them all.

We certainly have a lot of economic problems in this country, ones that need the serious attention of our leaders, many of whom have decreed the situation to be a “crisis”.

However, this not the kind of 24 crisis which demands that everyone maintain single, focused attention on the situation so that two or three absolutely life-threatening critical decisions can be made correctly before getting to the :28 station break.

As long as the President and Congress don’t spend long hours debating the minutia of the propositions, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t continue to issue these proclamations calling attention to a particular part of American society, in this case math education.

Or do any of the other mostly meaningless little pieces of ceremonial trivia that make up the pomp and circumstance of our federal government.

We will survive this economic mess as well as the theatrics surrounding the annual pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey.

government, math, trivia, twitter

In a short but excellent post, Dan explains why, when it comes to teaching math, we need to give our kids less, not more.

As my (patient) readership has no doubt realized, the impotency of our textbooks to do anything but teach procedure has recently whacked me over the head. Part of this, I realize, is fundamental to the print medium, which doesn’t permit a layered application of mathematical structures, but part of this is the inexcusable lack of imagination of publishing houses, whose bundled supplements are both costly and unhelpful, who don’t understand that they need to help students less:

Exactly!

At all levels in K12, we spend far too much time drilling the process of mathematics and not nearly enough time challenging kids to find their own process.

math, teaching

Michael Alison Chandler, a Post reporter who is spending the year taking Algebra II and blogging about her experiences, has arrived at the part of the curriculum that includes imaginary numbers.

Not surprisingly, she has questions.

First off, why is the square root of -1 “imaginary”? If nothing times itself can equal a negative number, than how can these numbers exist at all?

Second, Why do we need them? When, on earth, would you ever want to use them?

A few commenters offer answers to her first group of questions.  I’ll bet they’re also covered in the textbook.

Those in the second group are questions that all students should be asking – and getting good answers to – when studying math at any level.

Largely, however, they don’t.

algebra, math, washington post

In her continuing struggle with the Algebra II class that she’s taking this year, Post staff writer Michael Alison Chandler blogs about her quiz last week.

The topic was solving systems of linear equations and while she thinks she understands the process of doing matrix arithmetic, Chandler is confused about other factors.

It’s difficult to describe how or why math works. It’s easier to just write the formula and say, “Do this.” Several readers have commented on this blog that what’s often missing from math education is more of a focus on why certain applications work. I agree. It’s harder to remember what to do, if you don’t have some sense of why it works.

Knowing why the formula works would be excellent, although Chandler is probably in the minority among high school Algebra II students in wanting to move beyond the basic mechanics of getting the task done.

However, even more important would be if she and the rest of her class were learning how people actually use this process to solve real problems.

algebra, blogging, math, washington post