Math: American's suck at it, but maybe it isn't our fault

This article was in the nytimes most popular email this weekend, and I sure enjoyed it. But not as much as this article from the New Yorker earlier this year.

The latter is an exploration of how the mind learns math, while the former considers the possibility that American education has been working under some possibly erroneous assumptions.

Current popular opinion is that if you teach students math in the context of everyday life, they will be more engaged in it and therefore absorb more. This gets to be pretty frustrating when you get to algebra, because the whole point of algebra is to learn how to transfer from the concrete to the abstract and back. So its really a hard sell to students that they are going to use this on the weekend, at the mall. (On a side note, they totally will use fractions and decimals, so why the f haven't they mastered those? There was a quiet joke inside the math department that maybe if the school didn't crack down so hard on the drug dealers, then at least we would have a few students who could do fractions)

I recall watching a math coach answer the everpresent, "When are we ever going to need to know about parabolas?" with "Headlights of luxury cars are made from parabolas." Delinquent student Katie was thinking: "Ok, so parabolas exist in real life, but do you need to know the math to turn on the light switch? Isn't that just like 'flip,' their on?" While, simultaneously, total math dork Katie was thinking, "Headlights aren't really parabola because they exist in three dimensions." Of course, the student was enjoying the attention and being polite (for once), therefore furthering the math coach's belief that this totally lame "real world" example really could engage students.

But when it came district testing time, it was apparent that these meager methods were failing to reach or to teach the students. (Those of you who just said to yourselves, "Yeah, somebody was failing to teach, Hold your tongue!) Which brings us to the nytimes piece, and my favorite line: "Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment."

No one bothers to really investigate educational research technique. In my short tenure as a math teacher I learned to teach all sorts of theoretically opposed methods, each proven to be most effective. How is this possible?, you ask. They were all tested on academically inclined students in small classes. Hmm. Maybe academically inclined students in small classes who are then given even more attention from being in a pilot program is always do well.

And maybe Asian students will always do well. Wait... what?! That is why the New Yorker article is so great. Asian students are good at math because it is easy to count in Chinese. That is just so awesome, it totally lets us off the hook. And since I read it, I've felt pretty vindicated every time I used a calculator for basic arithmetic.

Maybe now I should write a math curriculum and sell it for millions to a big school district (yes, strangely enough, our poor, struggling inner city school districts pay millions for untested curricula). I will drop long division and multiplication tables and replace them with calculators and clear rules on how to write algebra. I mean it might not test any better than what we have now but I bet I could totally get a grant from Texas Instruments to write it.