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BC Prof Suggests Young Children Need Less Formal Math, Not More
DesScorp writes "Professor Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist and researcher at Boston College, recounts an experiment done in New Hampshire schools in 1929, where math was completely taken out of the curriculum of the poorest schools from the area until the sixth grade. The results were surprising; with just one year of math under their belts, the poor students did as well or better than students from better schools by the end of the sixth grade year, despite the fact that the better schools had math in their curriculum all throughout elementary school. Professor Gray thinks children are not mentally wired for the kind of formal math instruction that is taught in schools, and that we'd be better served by putting off the teaching of theory until the seventh grade. He scoffs at the notion that if children are failing with current levels of math instructions then we should double down and make them do more math in school."
Hello. I was a victim of New Math.
New Math presented me with set theory in elementary school.
Symbolic logic is not a mystery to me. Indeed, I aced a logic course where over half the people dropped it like a hot rock in the first week.
However, arithmetic with pencil and paper is like pulling teeth for me. I hate it with a passion. Learning how to do square roots in 7'th grade by pencil and paper was torture. Thank Glub for calculators.
So yes, your professor is entirely correct. Teaching set theory preps students for boolean algebra and all that happy nonsense. There are trade-offs, though.
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BMO