Why do we need to change how Math was taught?

Lots of people say, “Why do we need to change how Math is taught?  It worked fine for me.”

 

“It is among the greatest ironies of education that a subject so graceful and elegant, so able to inspire and bolster confidence, and so useful for living a joyous and effective life should be presented in a manner that strips it of its substance and glory and leaves students feeling bludgeoned and inept, convinced they ‘stink in math.’”

–Suzanne Sutton, Washington Post, 8-19-96

 The truth is that “it worked fine for me” isn’t really true, at least not for most people.  When you ask people how they feel about math, too many people say they hate it.  They stink at it.  It scares them.  It isn’t the math they hate; it is how it was taught.  Math was presented (and unfortunately in many cases still is) as a series of isolated skills governed by rules.  If you didn’t get it, you must either be stupid or stink at math.  The truth is that we have traditionally taken kids that love problems and discovering new things about the world and make them anxious and afraid because they haven’t memorized “the rules.”

 “Virtually all young children like mathematics.  They do mathematics naturally, discovering patterns and making conjectures based on observation.  Natural curiosity is a powerful teacher, especially for mathematics.

 Unfortunately, as children become socialized by school and society, they begin to view mathematics as a rigid system of externally dictated rules governed by standards of accuracy, speed, and memory.  Their view of mathematics shifts gradually from enthusiasm to apprehension, from confidence to fear.  Eventually, most students leave mathematics under duress, convinced that only geniuses can learn it.” – Everybody Counts (p. 43)

We had to change how we were teaching math because the way we were teaching math was not working for most students.  If we continue to do what we have always done, we will continue to get what we have always gotten.

What have we gotten?

o     Mountains of math anxiety

o     Tons of mathematical illiteracy

o     Mediocre test results

o     High School programs that barely work for half the kids nation wide

o     Gobs of remediation

o     A slew of criticism

- taken from a presentation, Making Math Work for Under-Achieving Students by Steve Leinwand on Dec. 9, 2004.

A fuller examination of this topic is presented in a document that is commonly called “the Standards.”  It is a document that was published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).

 http://www.nctm.org/standards/overview.htm

Another reason Mathematics instruction is changing is because of the United States poor showing in comparison to other countries on some assessments.  If you are interested in reading about how the United States has done in comparison to other countries, check out this link.

 http://timss.bc.edu/timss2003.html