[legerdemain]

The author's polemic only shows that his middle-school children have no intrinsic interest in the history of the Roman Empire, and also don't memorize arbitrary durations. Quick: how many years between the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War? What's the air speed of an unladen swallow? Is this the author's idea of an education?

[MiddleEndian]

>Recently I tried to help my son with his seventh grade math homework. I couldn’t do it.

This is not a ringing endorsement of the author's own problem-solving skills.

[browningstreet]

Have you tried the new math? The challenge is not a matter of the math, it’s a matter of formatting components of the answer in boxes. Without exposure to it, it’s nearly impossible to decipher. Which felt like half the point when I was doing it with my son.

[sircastor]

I understand the vitriol pointed at the “new math”, but it seems to me the complaints always focus towards “I got the right answer, why was I not rewarded?”. For it’s flaws, its seems these new programs are more focused on teaching kids how to reason, and as a result ask them to follow the process instead of simply arrive at the answer.

[chmod775]

> its seems these new programs are more focused on teaching kids how to reason, and as a result ask them to follow the process instead of simply arrive at the answer

You don't teach people to reason by giving them a step-by-step guide that they can mechanically follow without thinking.

You teach them to reason - to think - by giving them a problem and having them figure out how to solve it themselves.

Math shouldn't be about rote memorization and imitating a calculator. You can fit all the basic calculation skills people will need in everyday life in grade one to three, then teach them proper mathematics - which coincidentally means learning to reason in a precise manner.

[hakfoo]

That sounds like a nice idea, but the problem is that there are many different ways to reason about most math problems.

If a curriculum is badly designed, it's going to dump one model on the students, and that's going to come to the detriment of some of them. Maybe you already learned your multiplication tables, and sitting around and drawing a 5x6 grid and counting the squares is going to frustrate and annoy. It's almost certainly going to drive parents wild, because they won't be raised with the jargon and rules, leaving them unable to help.

There's also the risk that any new material is poorly debugged or documented. When it's just about "a single right answer", we probably can get consensus that 5x6=30. But if we try to grade the reasoning tools used to get there, those are often not as universally standardized. One kid draws his 5x6 grid horizontally, and one draws it vertically. The teachers and grading rubrics have to have enough understanding and flexibility to recognize they're equivalent. In the worst case, you end up distracting students from the actual concepts by weighing them down with a bunch of unrelated rules unique to the teaching system.

I recall taking a maths class once which basically covered the same problems several times over, each time using a different model to solve them. I could see a case for a course like that. But that was a 400-level elective college course, so there's probably different constraints and expectations than when you're trying to teach 4th grade students multiplication.

The other worry I have is that we're doing a lot of window-dressing in the name of reducing "math anxiety". Every few years they try to dress up math concepts in a new way in the hopes students will find them less intimidating. Why does this seem to be unique to math? There seems to be no rush to replace Shakespeare in the schools with something students can more easily reason about.

[legerdemain]

Hooray for New Math! New-hoo-hoo Math! It won't do you a bit of good to review math! It's so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it!

[avmich]

Tom Lehrer is quite good on this :) .

[Avamander]

Have you tried Haskell? The challenge is not a matter of the programming, it’s a matter of formatting components of the answer in boxes. Without exposure to it, it’s nearly impossible to decipher. Which felt like half the point when I was doing it with my son.

Have you considered that different approaches to the same problem might indeed feel alien to you due to your lack of exposure, but aren't really that different?

[aidenn0]

I know dozens of ways to think about multiplication and division problems. However when the math question says "Solve this multiplication problem by making a landmark number" I'm kind of lost. I can guess what they mean, but it is often something that would be marked wrong.

Similarly I've seen Array questions marked wrong because they curriculum defines which order (row, column) lines up with the multiplicands and the student has them reversed...

[bsder]

Agreed. The author completely gets everything backward.

Why should his child care about how long America has existed unless it's on a test?

If you don't give someone a reason for why something is relevant, you won't get anywhere. If you don't try to make it interesting, to boot, you have no hope.

[inglor_cz]

Yeah, studying history without questions is a chore.

A good question might be: "Why did the Roman empire hold together that long and survived several serious crises, even though many other empires exploded and disintegrated in their first crisis ever, as the subjugated nations rushed for exits?"

That question has no definite answer, but boy (or girl), you learn a lot of fascinating history while trying to answer it.

[vondur]

African or European swallow?