A recognition of how poor our mathematics education had become and perhaps some reason for hope was the report in September 2006 by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, reversing its ill-chosen advisory of 1989. The earlier report recommended a curriculum that dropped emphasis on basic math skills (multiplication, division, square roots, and so on) and pressed students to seek more free-flowing solutions and to study a range of special math topics. I always wondered how you can learn math unless you have a thorough grounding in the basics and concentrate on a very few subjects at a time. Asking children to use their imagination before they know what they imagining about seemed vacuous to me. It was.
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
p. 406
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This is a wonderful quote. “Free-flowing solutions” strikes me as an apt description of what goes on around here.
ReplyDeleteI wonder who or what convinced him that there’s been a major turnaround.
My husband happens to be attending a conference today in Chicago where Greenspan will be keynote speaker. I asked my husband to pass a note to Greenspan. Something like, EARTH TO ALAN, SCHOOLS ARE STILL NOT TEACHING BASIC MATH SKILLS
GOOD!
ReplyDeleteI read another interesting passage, in which he says he had a huge research staff at the Fed, and could order up anything he wanted, including histories of this, that, or the other.
This tells me that some researcher at the Fed has written a history and/or critique of constructivist math and the NCTM.
It would be interesting to read that thing...