What's the newest thing in math? Old math

MARGARET WENTE
753 words
26 September 2006
The Globe and Mail
A17
English

Last week, at North America's largest gathering of math teachers, one high-school teacher stood up and said something that university professors and employers have known for years. The widespread use of "new math" and a reliance on calculators, he said, have been a disaster for students' math skills. "Kids arrive in my class and I have to backtrack and teach them the basics," he said. He declined to give his name, saying he feared reprisals.

Soon, perhaps, he need fear no more. After more than 15 years of disastrous experimentation with new math (also known as constructivist, experiential, discovery or fuzzy math, depending on your point of view), a sea change is at hand. The powerful U.S. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which threw its weight behind the new math in 1989, has now endorsed a renewed emphasis on basic skills. For the first time, it has boldly stated that fourth graders ought to know their times tables.

You can thank the kids in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea for this breakthrough. They run rings around North American kids in math. Now that competition has gone global, such things matter. (Canadian kids do somewhat better than American ones, but worse than those in Asia.)

Asian kids learn math by focusing on a handful of subjects and doing lots of rapid mental problem-solving. Their textbooks are lean and full of numbers. North American kids spend lots of time working with physical objects called "manipulatives" and describing ways to arrive at the answers. Their textbooks are fat and full of illustrations. As the math council itself admitted, today's math curriculums are a mile wide and an inch deep.

In Ontario, students can get a higher mark for a wrong answer with a good written explanation than for a right answer. Parents sometimes complain that their kids spend more time writing about math than doing it. Meantime, quick recall has been abandoned in favour of calculators (although I am happy to report that the times tables have been making a comeback). "Kids today cannot do basic math operations without a calculator," says Doretta Wilson, director of the reform-minded Society for Quality Education.

The president of the math council, as well as Canada's curriculum establishment, play down the math wars. They strenuously deny that they abandoned the basics. But, throughout the 1990s, educators across North America argued that "rote learning" (memorizing number facts) was a hindrance rather than a help in developing mathematical understanding. Far better to let the kids discover the answers for themselves. There was just one problem. In many jurisdictions that adopted the new approach, math scores plummeted. In the U.S., furious parents signed petitions, and hundreds of leading mathematicians and scientists signed protest letters, to little avail. As it turned out, the biggest beneficiary of the new math was the tutoring industry.

"This is a major turnaround," Chester Finn, a leading education official in the Reagan administration, told The New York Times. "This is definitely a back-to-basics victory." Even the liberal-minded Times is cheering. "Until we bite the bullet on those basic critical reforms, we will continue to lose ground to the countries with which we must compete in the global information economy," it editorialized last week.
So, are the math wars over? Far from it. Canada's education systems move at a glacial pace. In Ontario, for example, Ms. Wilson estimates that it takes a decade for genuine reforms to make themselves felt. Faculties of education are among the biggest obstacles to change. They are devoted to constructive math, which ties into the current, very hot idea that kids have many different learning styles. Influential educators warn tomorrow's teachers that they're likely to encounter wrongheaded popular resistance to progressive teaching methods.
On top of that, the system has a vast amount of money invested in new-math textbooks, and no money to invest in better ones. The provincial math tests would have to be completely overhauled, too, since they are fashioned to reward students not so much for math proficiency as for reflecting the theory by which they're taught.

Doretta Wilson doesn't really care about theory. "I'd be happy if all the kids could just add and subtract and multiply and divide without a calculator," she says. Perhaps, some day, they will. Meantime, there's always Kumon.

mwente@globeandmail.com

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