Meanwhile with McKiever : New math or any other kind isn’t for all of us
Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/brog/News/62245/
There’s a joke in the newsroom that reporters may be able to write, but they are pitiful when it comes to numbers. Subtraction throws them for a loop. They’re a little shaky when it comes to multiplication and you might as well forget about division.
Mathematics is not their strong suit. It’s true for me. I can diagram a sentence easily enough, but I’d just as soon pass the math problems to someone else. In school these days, I don’t think they diagram sentences anymore and math doesn’t even resemble what it was years ago when I was in school. In fact, since the late ’ 80 s, it’s become popular in schools, at least at lower grade levels, to teach “ concept-based” math.
From reading about the controversy the “ new math” has created, the problem is between teachers who think “ concept-based” is the way to go vs. parents of students who want old fashioned math taught — only one way to get the answer. Many parents complain that they want to be able to help their children with homework but are unable to do so because they don’t understand what their children have been taught.
An example I read about: When a parent is asked to multiply 88 by 5, parents do it with pen and paper. Multiply 8 by 5 and carry over the 4, and so forth. A child today, practicing the concepts he’s been taught, is likely to reason that 5 is half of 10, and 88 times 10 is 880, so 88 times 5 is half of that, 440. No pen. No paper. Boom. An accurate answer.
To arrive at that answer, students are taught reasoning skills in the classroom. They don’t have textbooks explaining how to attain those skills and that may be part of the frustration to parents. How to understand without books or instructions ? Many a home can be turned into an unpleasant place when parents try to help kids with homework and have no instructions or guides.
My weakness in the numbers department developed long before “ new math” came along. For quite a while, I just blamed Mrs. Thurman, my third grade teacher. I’m not sure why. I guess it was because fourth grade math became a little challenging for me. By high school, I depended on doing homework with parents’ and friends help, along with plenty of prayer before a math exam.
I took the minimum number of math credits required in college and I did okay. I finally quit blaming Mrs. Thurman and realized all of us have gifts and talents in different areas. And I knew for sure mine didn’t involve numbers.
• • • Tonya McKiever’s column appears on Sundays.