Op Ed: Who's failing math? The system

[gibbinator]

This is a Canadian article, but our education systems have also switched to the same new math ideas so it can be relevant to the US too.

www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/whos-failing-math-the-system/

Who's Failing Math? The System



Here’s some bad news from the world of education: Math scores are in decline across Canada. Just as kids in Poland and Portugal and other formerly disadvantaged countries are taking great leaps forward, ours are going backward. Our high schools are graduating kids who have failed to grasp the fundamentals, and our universities are full of students who are struggling to master material they should have learned in high school.





Editorial cartoons from September, 2013



What’s gone wrong isn’t a mystery. For the past decade and more, school systems across the country have been performing a vast experiment on your children. They have discarded “rote” learning in favour of “discovery,” a process by which students are supposed to come up with their own solutions to the mysteries of arithmetic. There’s ample evidence that this approach leaves millions of kids (to say nothing of their parents) baffled and confused, and it is being abandoned in large parts of the United States. This has not deterred legions of Canadian education theorists and consultants from pressing on. Perhaps they’re secretly in league with Kumon and Sylvan to drum up business.







Ontario Education Minister Liz Sandals thinks she knows why scores are slipping. Most elementary school teachers have backgrounds in the liberal arts. Their acquaintance with math is sketchy at best. (Ms. Sandals, no slouch with numbers, has a masters degree in math.) And teachers’ college doesn’t give them enough grounding. “We need to deal with math so that the teachers have the same comfort level with teaching math that they do with reading and writing,” she said last week.







Actually, the problem is much deeper than that. The teachers may be clueless, but the methods they’re supposed to use are bound to fail. The curriculum has downgraded arithmetic to near-invisibility. The “progressive” approach to instruction guarantees that many students will not master basic skills, will not understand fractions, will not learn to multiply or divide two-digit numbers on their own. After all, that’s what calculators are for!







“Provincial curriculum guides and math textbooks have been systematically expunged of the standard algorithms,” Manitoba teacher Michael Zwaagstra, a leading education critic, told me. An algorithm is simply a rule that tells you how to do stuff. For example, how do you add 2,368 and 9,417? If you learned the standard way, you’ll stack the numbers and start adding from the right: 8+7=15, carry the 1 and so on.







That may be efficient, but it’s hopelessly uncreative. With “discovery” math, kids are encouraged to reinvent the wheel by, say, starting on the left, adding the thousands, then the hundreds, then the tens and ones, and adding them all up at the end. Then they have to write a story about how they got the answer. Needless to say, this takes a whole lot longer.







The trouble is that math is built on fundamentals. If you miss a building block, you’re likely to become progressively confused. To make things worse, the current practice of social promotion – moving kids from grade to grade even if they’re hopelessly at sea – guarantees that armies of youngsters whose parents can’t afford Kumon will be left in the dark. So much for equality in education.







For years, math professors at our leading universities have been telling elementary and high-school educators that their methods don’t work. But the educators and the teachers’ colleges have refused to listen. After all, what do the professors know? They’re just math geeks. They have no idea how to teach children. As a consequence, there is now an almost total disconnect between the math that’s taught in most schools and the math that students need in university or the real world in order to succeed. It’s notable that educators in Eastern Europe and Asia, in particular, are astounded by what they’ve seen happening in North America.







So maybe those sinking test scores are a good thing. The education establishment may be immune to public pressure, but politicians are not. In Manitoba, where math professors and parents have been up in arms, the government has announced a bold new policy – it’s bringing back arithmetic! “Let’s face it,” Education Minister Nancy Allan told the Winnipeg Free Press, “doing math in your head is important.”







As for parents who don’t live in Manitoba, not all is lost. You can lobby, too. You can look up the Khan Academy on YouTube, which offers very good instructional videos for free. Or there’s Kumon and its ilk. Wouldn’t it be nice if our schools could put them out of business?

[gibbinator]

I understand where the theory with getting the kids to understand the math comes from and to work it out for themselves. I also recognize that rote memorization is not the best method for a good number of students.

But I think it's more the approach or time constraints or something that are the problem than either method.

Anecdote time. I was in grade 11 iirc when the new textbooks came out. And they made no goddamn sense. Our advanced math teacher was great at teaching the regular math method but all the normally strong students just totally floundered when the new method was introduced. He was so patient with us and we were constantly doing extra help (a fairly foreign concept to some of us) but the scenarios and methods were confusing, seemed not to relate to anything, and honestly I felt like we were going backwards several grade levels. The other math teachers (in other grades and academic math) had similar complaints. Maybe it would have made more sense if we'd started this way in elementary school rather than being forced to switch near the end of our schooling? Ultimately our teacher said to Hell with the school board and handed out all the 1960s textbooks again. Was that the best solution? I mean, keeping in mind most teachers these days learned to teach the old math and were then tossed into the new stuff probably with not enough support themselves. I think only the under 30s really got an education in it.

I think it would make more sense, like in most things, to use a combination approach. A bit of this, a bit of that. Obviously neither approach on its own is working for everyone. I have no idea what percentage of students actually excel at rote memorization but I'm sure it's not high or everyone would do well. Does 50% sound like a fair guess?

Additionally, I bet given enough time any approach to learning math would work. Those new textbooks just sped through concepts like any other textbook but it seemed like from one page to the next the concepts didn't link.

[aprilsails]

Oh my God this is my favourite topic.

I went through OAC during the double cohort in Ontario where half of us had the old math and an extra year of school and half the students had the new math. The new math kids were screwed in my engineer classes in first year university and I spent a huge amount of time explaining derivation and integration to them since our physics and calculus classes assumed everyone would now this stuff.

My Sister went all the way through school on the new math. She's a smart cookie and aced everything, but she too hit a brick wall and contacted me when she went to university. I mailed her my old OAC workbooks.

Meanwhile my good friend is currently teaching a 5/6 split. She has parent interviews next week and we were just discussing Friday night how she can explain to parents that their kids are performing at a Grade 3 level in math, but will still be sent to middle school next year. She's tried everything and she actually had a strong math background in university (major in geography, minors in math and computer programming!) I feel terrible for these kids. She says there is just not enough time, 29 kids at two different grade levels in her class, and she also has 5 kids with IEPs that need further instructional accommodations. So many don't have the basics from previous years that she can't bring them up to speed and is panicking about when the hell they will ever have a chance to catch up.

[redheadk]

I want to talk about this but really do need to jump in the shower and go to the grocery store. I'll be back.

But this?:

But I think it's more the approach or time constraints or something that are the problem than either method.

YES.

[gibbinator]

Jan 31, 2016 11:42:44 GMT -5 aprilsails said:

Oh my God this is my favourite topic.

I went through OAC during the double cohort in Ontario where half of us had the old math and an extra year of school and half the students had the new math. The new math kids were screwed in my engineer classes in first year university and I spent a huge amount of time explaining derivation and integration to them since our physics and calculus classes assumed everyone would now this stuff.

My Sister went all the way through school on the new math. She's a smart cookie and aced everything, but she too hit a brick wall and contacted me when she went to university. I mailed her my old OAC workbooks.

I forgot about this. My DH, who is a few years older than me and was taught the old method the whole way, but who barely passed grade 12 math with a 50% had to teach me, the honour student, how the hell to do derivatives when I was taking university Calculus. He was kind of shocked how lost I was.

[gibbinator]

I'm on the computer now, so here is the article for the lazy people. Apparently I can't edit my OP? must be something to do with the lock on editing but maybe an EllieArroway can tidy up this thread and merge this post with my OP?

[EllieArroway]

Jan 31, 2016 12:50:19 GMT -5 gibbinator said:

I'm on the computer now, so here is the article for the lazy people. Apparently I can't edit my OP? must be something to do with the lock on editing but maybe an EllieArroway can tidy up this thread and merge this post with my OP?

Done. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. 

[gibbinator]

Jan 31, 2016 12:54:14 GMT -5 EllieArroway said:

Jan 31, 2016 12:50:19 GMT -5 gibbinator said:

I'm on the computer now, so here is the article for the lazy people. Apparently I can't edit my OP? must be something to do with the lock on editing but maybe an EllieArroway can tidy up this thread and merge this post with my OP?

Done. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. 

No worries, totally valid lock down!

[oswin]

I'm not terribly familiar with what the old way or the new way look like, since I was homeschooled and probably learned it differently anyway. But in my limited experience with students and from various anecdotes from teacher friends and my Dad (former college math professor), I think learning math comes down to one very important thing: understanding concepts. It doesn't matter if you're using an older style of adding or a newer style, the important thing is whether the students understand the concept. Even in my fairly limited experience, I can't tell you how many times the student just wanted to know which formula to use, instead of trying to understand what the problem was and what approach might be useful in solving it. Rote memorization is a bad way to learn a concept, but repetition is also necessary to help the concept and the execution of the solution to sink in. I also happen to think that the single best way to improve education is to have smaller class sizes, since it seems obvious to me that 25-30 kids aren't going to all understand math in the same way and a lot of them will need to be exposed to multiple methods to find the one that they understand.

I'm sure this isn't a new problem, but it has always boggled my mind that especially in a subject like math, where almost every thing you learn is needed to be understood because it gets built on later, that a passing grade can be had while missing 30-40% of the concepts. When you're missing that much but get jumped up to the next level anyway, you can get hopelessly lost very quickly, so all it takes is one bad teacher or even just getting a few weeks behind due to illness to more or less permanently derail a student's mathematical learning.

[niq]

In the most recent local math curriculum stir -- maybe a year or two ago? -- the school district ended up adopting a "Singapore method"-based textbook series over a more middle of the road textbook that a stakeholder's committee had recommended. A teacher friend of mine was on the committee; he was understandably PO'd that the school board got steamrolled by a bunch of activists and bloggers (Cliff Mass -- a local celebrity meteorologist, no lie -- was a big part of the campaign). I don't think it's a Kaplan or Kumon series.

I didn't follow the action super closely. The Singapore method is the one you read about when people reshare articles about actual rocket scientists complaining that they don't understand how to do their second grade child's math homework. But my impression from afar is that Singapore is trying to give kids lots of different techniques for tackling a given math task, and hoping that enough of them stick. Intuitively this makes sense, but it always struck me that some of the basics in math just took a lot of practice more than anything else. Maybe there is a happy medium between the two?

[joenali]

Jan 31, 2016 17:47:55 GMT -5 niq said:

In the most recent local math curriculum stir -- maybe a year or two ago? -- the school district ended up adopting a "Singapore method"-based textbook series over a more middle of the road textbook that a stakeholder's committee had recommended. A teacher friend of mine was on the committee; he was understandably PO'd that the school board got steamrolled by a bunch of activists and bloggers (Cliff Mass -- a local celebrity meteorologist, no lie -- was a big part of the campaign). I don't think it's a Kaplan or Kumon series.

I didn't follow the action super closely. The Singapore method is the one you read about when people reshare articles about actual rocket scientists complaining that they don't understand how to do their second grade child's math homework. But my impression from afar is that Singapore is trying to give kids lots of different techniques for tackling a given math task, and hoping that enough of them stick. Intuitively this makes sense, but it always struck me that some of the basics in math just took a lot of practice more than anything else. Maybe there is a happy medium between the two?

I teach second grade and use Math in Focus. MIF and Singapore use concrete, Pictorial, abstract sequence to teach. For example if I'm going to teach stack and "carry" or really it should be called regrouping I can't just teach the abstract first. We start with let's say 10 beans on a Popsicle stick to represent 10s. And single beans to represent ones. Once kids understand that 10 ones is the same as a 10, we move on to something a bit more abstract like base 10 blocks. The we think about the standard algorithm while using the place value mat and base ten blocks to regroup. That way, students understand what it means to "carry" or regroup. Then we might even move on to something g a bit more abstract like number discs. You have ones, 10s and hundreds represented by discs (kind of like coins) instead of base 10 blocks.

If I just teach the standard algorithm they done know why they are doing it. You can't go right to the abstract and expect understanding.

This is not new math. This the "why".