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Mathematics fundamentals get new life

Inside Bay Area
Article Last Updated:10/11/2006 08:33:14 AM PDT

THERE are prodigies - children who have an inexplicable, innate ability to perform virtuoso mental, artistic or physical feats - but for the vast majority of human beings, acquiring skills is a more laborious process. Simply put, we must crawl before we can walk, walk before we can run, and run before we can aspire to higher levels.

Mental development is fundamentally no different. Most of us may be born with the potential to learn - to gain knowledge and reasoning skills - but realizing that potential takes hard work and good instruction.
We Americans used to understand the concept of educational progression - of instilling fundamental skills early and completely so that they became natural extensions of childrens lives, thus equipping them for moving into higher realms of learning and reasoning. But somewhere and somehow, we lost our way.

Educational concepts that had stood generations of Americans in good stead - phonics-based reading, memorizing multiplication tables, basic rules of grammar - were cast aside in the 1970s and 1980s in favor of reforms that reflected the moral relativism of the age and would, their advocates insisted, make learning more fun.

A 1989 decree by the National Council of Mathematics Teachers typified the trend, casting aside such concepts as multiplication tables in favor of what came to be known as fuzzy math that favored estimates over exactitude and assumed that everyone would always use a calculator.

Innumeracy - a chronic inability to understand and apply mathematics to work and daily life - is rampant, and the abysmally poor performance of American children in international mathematics test comparisons is graphic proof that fuzzy math is an abject failure. For nearly two decades, math wars have raged in academic and political circles over what children should learn. And California has been a major front.

Hostilities erupted in California during the mid-1990s when then-Gov. Pete Wilson and legislators, prodded the state Board of Education to adopt new standards. Marion Joseph, a one-time top state education official, came out of retirement to take a seat on the state board and lead the charge for change.

An advisory panel recommended standards that moved toward more mathematical fundamentals, but the state board put even more emphasis on basics and adopted them after a battle with Delaine Eastin, then-state schools superintendent.

Some states followed Californias model and others continued a fuzzier version of math. But Joseph and the other back-to-basics advocates appear to be having the last laugh. With the nation moving toward national academic standards, but with huge differences in approaches among the states, the National Council of Mathematics Teachers has revisited the issue and in a new encyclical has figuratively abandoned the fuzzy approach and recommended grade-by-grade guidelines that move substantially back to fundamentals.

You have to wade through reams of jargon to find the changes. The guidelines dont use the term multiplication tables, for example, but say that kids in elementary school should become proficient in multiplication facts. Leaders of the math teachers council are reluctant to say that there is a major change, instead describing the new guidelines as building on previous suggestions. But a side-by-side comparison indicates that what the council is proposing and what California adopted a decade ago are quite similar.

Readin, ritin and rithmetic - maybe theres some hope for the three Rs after all.

Dan Walters writes for the Sacramento Bee.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/argus/oped/ci_4474519