I play a game on a certain site called Joggle, its a word game, sort of like Boggle, only online. Anyway, they have a forum, and one of the other players is writing a book on how math should be taught.
I was impressed with what little I have read of it, as he added some excerpts in the forum.
this is one of them:
From: superjudge Date: October 1, 2007 Time: 2:45:54 AM [REPLY]
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This is my first draft of the preface/intro to my book, tentatively titled "X2 Files: The Secret Failure of Math Education"
The big theme of the book is the topic of a couple of keynotes that I have given, "Perspiration vs. Inspiration: Which Mathematical Road Are We On?
There will be edits of course, but this is the direction of the book
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The innocence of children is perhaps captured none better than when they
taste new food for the first time. Graces, manners, and customs are hilariously
absent when a baby rejects the offerings from a frustrated parent in no uncertain
terms. I have pictures of my son doing battle royal with pureed squash with his hands
unknowingly paying homage to Bruce Lee. His face is a portrait of pain and obstinance
that borders cartoon exaggeration—although it often seems that his head has the ability
to swivel 180 degrees away from the incoming mash of death.
The communication is unrefined, but it is highly effective. The crying, screaming and
stiff-arming not only keeps the evil root vegetable at bay, it makes me rethink my
approach to giving my son the nourishment and flavor that he deserves.
For most of us, math was the orange guck of education. And, schools worldwide
have been serving this historically unsatisfying gruel for over 50 years. The packaging
might have changed (fancier textbooks and fancier calculators), but the content and
the approach have yet to see a revolution of any significance—most people still hate
math! Finding medians of triangles might have been crucial to people during the baby
boom—a mathematical procedure having all the drama of a cheese sandwich—but today
it only qualifies as the pogo stick of mathematics. The uncontested Canon of
mathematics still must be learned by all of us. Correction. Endured by all of us.
We are still solving math problems involving digging ditches, rowing boats
upstream, calculating angles of guy wires and picking marbles out of a bag. I often
wonder why I also didn’t succumb to the cricket sounds that were produced by these
sleep-inducing topics.
In addition to a stale math curriculum, schools are frantically seeking breadth,
instead of calmly seeking depth. Deep understanding has been replaced by the popular
understudy called correctness. Calculators and teaching to the test have allowed for rave
reviews for this misguided goal of mathematics. Students, teachers, administrators and
parents can all share the blame in having math riddled with memorization tricks and
gimmicky language. Flip it and multiply is still used by many teachers to explain to
students how to divide fractions. Even Danica McKellar, who played Winnie on The
Wonder Years, advocates this kind of explanation in her book, Math Doesn’t Suck.
Actually Danica, a lot of high school math does and so does your “mathemagican”
explanation of division.
Why children still need to find the answer to something like 4⅜ ÷ 1⅔ is completely
beyond me. Oh sure, like a trained seal they can get the correct answer, but what’s the
point when they don’t really understand the question or the answer. Keep spinning that
ball on your nose, Jimmy. Mathematics education: Wasting the lives of one student at
a time.
It’s small wonder that very few people understand mathematics, never mind enjoy it.
While the carrot of assessment dangles in every subject, mathematics cannot exist
without it. The audience does not want to learn math—it has to learn math.
This might be acceptable if the knowledge that was communicated was breathtaking
or beneficial. And while there are points of brilliant light in math education, the overall
spectrum suffers from an almost immovable dullness. As a result of these factors and
many more, the actual literacy level of the average high school math student is probably
near a primary level. Yes. I said “literacy”. I don’t like “numeracy” because it sounds
like it was invented by someone who writes jingles for a living. Mathematics is a
a beautiful language that is a thousands of years old. Please don’t refer to it in a way that
implies it can be reduced to counting on your fingers and toes. And therein lies the heart
of the problem—false representation. Mathematics is one of the most stunning and
boundless parts of our existence. An inability to communicate its true measure and worth
is a tragic failure that has yet to be reported. Until now.
You and others have millions of hours of experience toiling in the mathematical mines,
excavating supposed brilliant deposits of knowledge—which unbeknownst to you, turned
out to be worthless lumps of coal. Your stories of boredom, intimidation and anxiety
have rarely been heard outside the narrow walls of academia. Any documentation on the
harm on the relevancy and stress of how and what students learn about math in school has
been far removed from public consumption.
The safe and explorative environment that children start out learning math in is very
soon replaced by one that is preoccupied with constant testing, unwarranted volumes of
homework and various societal pressures—never tempered by the realities of childhood
and adolescence. Math classrooms of today are more like academic sweatshops,
producing perspiration instead of inspiration. Most math teachers roll out the
curriculum with the speed of a runaway train—often unconcerned whether or not
passengers are actually boarding. My favorite high school teacher taught us with the
calmness and relaxed demeanor that made you feel like you were sipping lemonade
with him on a breezy summer day. His name was Mr. Scott. He was a tall, somewhat
gangly fellow. His height, warmth and wisdom made me think of Gandalf from Lord of
the Rings. The only thing he ever held in his hand was a cup of coffee. No chalk. No
marker. Nothing. Whenever he took a satisfying gulp from his cup, you could be sure
a probing question or wonderful observation was going to follow.
Mr. Scott was my history teacher. While students loved the way he could talk about
bloody Assyrian battles, Napolean’s ingenious morale building techniques, or the
bravery of World War I soldiers combating mustard gas(wrapping shirts soaked in urine
around their faces), it is not why we loved Mr. Scott.
His ability to communicate history with astonishing detail was eclipsed by the elements
that are in short supply in not just math, but most subjects—passion and love.
His smile. His voice projection. His smirks and timely inflections. His purposeful eyes.
They all merged many times during his lessons to underscore how much he loved his
job, subject and students.
If love is not at the bottom of your craft/knowledge, then communicating it to strange
and detached students will be a fruitless endeavor. You might as well give them links
to Wikipedia and be done with it. So, while this book does have strong overtones of
that angry letter to the editor, it is in the end, a love letter to mathematics.
In this letter I hope you find that she is not some ugly creature pocked with blemishes
of polynomials, marked with scars of useless long division, and saddled with a
personality of a toad with its slavish devotion to the absurd demands of fraction
reduction. If this story could be told as Beauty and the Beast, then it is mathematics
which is Beauty and education which is Beast. The tragedy is that education has
rendered and distilled mathematics from a vintage bottle of wine to a commercial vat
of vinegar. The only thing which rivals the ire towards mathematics is the school’s
cafeteria serving fish sticks on a Monday.
The problem is that fish sticks only cost you 5 bucks. Receiving a poor math
education was a much steeper cost. You don’t know it, but you are still paying for
it today. Do you buy insurance? Do you buy more than one lottery ticket? Do you
buy extended warranties? Do you rely heavily on a calculator? Do you still imagine
doodled drawings of your math teachers with plus signs for eyes? If you said yes to any
of these questions, then you better take your math education to the 7th floor of Sears and
demand a refund.
In lieu of deserving reparation for your years of confusion, boredom and anxiety, I
offer you this book. You won’t get any better at calculus, but you will wish that you
could.
“Not everyone can be a mathematician, but everyone should want to be one”
R. Moore
you can read more here
http://joggle.pixelsharp.com/f_view_topic.asp?id=3499
one of the other players has totally attacked him and his writing, which seems to take away any comments directed at the writing of the book.
I can't seem to understand why some people have to be so mean. this is what he said about the book:
From: mr_bog Date: October 2, 2007 Time: 10:21:44 AM [REPLY]
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It comes off as quite pretentious and arrogant and overblown to me. If your pontifications on mathematics are anything like your sophomorisms on politics, then I think I can do without it. To quote Eulcid "There is no royal road to geometry
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in the forum there, is a site posted that is sort of an explanation of the reason the other guy is attacking him, but I just don't get it??