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An Advanced Math Education Revolution Is Underway In the U.S. (theatlantic.com)
AthanasiusKircher writes: The Atlantic has an >extended article on the recent surge in advanced math education at the primary and secondary levels in the U.S., arguing that last year's victory for the U.S. in the Math Olympiad was not a random anomaly. Participation in math camps, after-school or weekend math "academies," and math competitions has surged in recent years, with many programs having long wait lists. Inessa Rifkin, co-founder of one of these math academies, argues that the problems with math education begin in the 2nd and 3rd grades: ""The youngest ones, very naturally, their minds see math differently.... It is common that they can ask simple questions and then, in the next minute, a very complicated one. But if the teacher doesn't know enough mathematics, she will answer the simple question and shut down the other, more difficult one." These alternative math programs put a greater focus on problem-solving: "Unlike most math classes, where teachers struggle to impart knowledge to students—who must passively absorb it and then regurgitate it on a test—problem-solving classes demand that the pupils execute the cognitive bench press: investigating, conjecturing, predicting, analyzing, and finally verifying their own mathematical strategy. The point is not to accurately execute algorithms, although there is, of course, a right answer... Truly thinking the problem through—creatively applying what you know about math and puzzling out possible solutions—is more important."
The article concludes by noting that programs like No Child Left Behind have focused on minimal standards, rather than enrichment activities for advanced students. The result is a disparity in economic backgrounds for students in pricey math activities; many middle-class Americans investigate summer camps or sports programs for younger kids, but they don't realize how important a math program could be for a curious child. As Daniel Zaharopol, founder of a related non-profit initiative, noted in his searches to recruit low-income students: "Actually doing math should bring them joy."
The article concludes by noting that programs like No Child Left Behind have focused on minimal standards, rather than enrichment activities for advanced students. The result is a disparity in economic backgrounds for students in pricey math activities; many middle-class Americans investigate summer camps or sports programs for younger kids, but they don't realize how important a math program could be for a curious child. As Daniel Zaharopol, founder of a related non-profit initiative, noted in his searches to recruit low-income students: "Actually doing math should bring them joy."
But will it get you a job? Only employers know what it is important to know.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
drop the silly coding classes that gives nothing ('nerds' will learn anyways, others never will), do maths!
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but will americans ever be free of mind control to even ask,
"I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too." - from 'notes from underground' by fyodor dostoyevsky
I have noticed that Public education is getting better in the US. They are now teaching Math much more effectively (at least at the elementary school level). At first I thought the Common Core was dumb after my elementary school child showed me what he was doing, but after researching the teaching methods I know understand the reasoning behind techniques they are using. Plus the efforts of Code.org to introduce our kids to logic and programming at an elementary school level is really helping with all of their studies. Amazingly teaching basic logic helps in all aspects of life. Kudos to the Common Core people and Code.org. Too frequently the teaching "experts" are teaching the wrong techniques. Anyone who grew up learning "new math" (Venn diagrams, etc) in the early and mid 1980s public schools knows what I mean by that!
The way math is taught, Math is a chore. The way common core teaches it, it's a stupid, idiotic chore.
There is never an example of the wonders of math. No examples of what can be accomplished and how you can actually benefit. It's just a series of numbered problems with the answers to the odd numbers in the back and precious little explanation. Something to finish before class is out and to remember just long enough to pass the next test.
Math is a chore because it's taught like a chore.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
A focus on general problem solving skills was the main agenda of "new math" which contributed to a heavy decline of math skills in the past decades. That this very same method suddenly gives great results seems unlikely. Perhaps something else changed, or the author takes the wrong numbers as a basis. An increased success of elites, e.g. by having more winners in math olympiads, does not necessarily indicate an overall better education. I'm not saying flat-out that the author is wrong, perhaps something has improved, but count me among the skeptics.
In the rest of the world the subject is mathematics
plural
apparntly in America there is only one math.
It can help you workout how bad that forced meal plan is and how fast that student loans interest adds up.
From my experience with kids of this generation, there's one teacher who's responsible for most of the positive increase in mathematical competency in recent years: Salman Khan.
I'm sure you'll find any number of politicians and their cronies at the textbook corporations who will claim credit, but when they mess everything up and the children find themselves mystified and befuddled, they turn to Khan for help.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
in the 80's in elementary school we spent years doing the basic operations and the daily homework was dozens of easy and mind numbing problems. didn't start algebra until 7th grade honors math. my oldest kid is in third grade and they are already doing fractions with different denominators. the basic operations start in kindergarten now. the homework is a sheet of a few problems but word problems every day. less time but a lot more effective. i saw a sixth grade math text and they are doing algebra with multiple variables
The kids winning these competitions today were not taught Common Core math in elementary school.
Or to put it another way, these gains will not be long lived as the inadequately taught youth in elementary school today make their way into the secondary levels.
The winners of the olympiad were:
Shyam Narayanan, David Stoner, Michael Kural, Ryan Alweiss, Yang Liu and Allen Liu
I hate to break the news, but most likely 3 if not 4 out of 6 were either immigrants or children of the immigrants from the regions of the world, where learning hard sciences is a strong family culture with serious attention and pressure from the parents.
I've taught classes in the use of computers and technology in education, mostly to teachers who needed credits to keep up their certifications. Far too many of the K-6 (kindergarten through 6th grade) teachers objected any time I talked about anything math-related in class. Many times I heard objections like "math was not supposed to be a prerequisite for this course" or words to that effect.
It's no wonder that many kids come out of elementary school less than enchanted with math.
With the true unemployment rate, the UG rate, hovering at almost 10% and the fact that the economy never totally recovered under Obama I have to wonder where the new math grads will find employment.
There really is no need of math in the modern usa. The jobs which require math all go to h1b.
So, instead, we the usa needs to be focused on raising a society of creative socialpaths who, like Elon or Steve Jobs, can make creative choices and design nice looking products and then lay off their co-workers and hire the h1b's to make it happen.
Math is unless when the people you are competing against are willing live 12 to a rented house (down the road from me, this is true, 12 h1b's in 1 3 bedroom house) and work like indentured servants for 50 cents on the dollar what a usa worker would make.
Or we need to train the youth in union politics so we can unionize the stem workers against the excessives of h1b capitialism.
That sentence makes no sense. Also, the idea that "math activities" are "pricey" makes no sense.
My father taught me binary in the early seventies when I was still in elementary school, with black marbles and a grey egg carton. I got it right away. Numbers were one thing, representations of numbers was another thing, and these could be whatever you found convenient, so long as you obeyed certain rules (I wasn't so accelerated that I immediately started banging out Euclid's Elements on the piano).
Then I thought really hard one Saturday afternoon about fractions (on the unit interval, which I thought of as positive integers with the numerator greater than the denominator), and discovered that even though there are a lot of them, it is possible to enumerate them exhaustively, though not by the traditional "counting up" procedure, which got me hooked into the problem of the common divisor thing.
The next project I recall was to exhaustive write out the Tic Tac Toe game tree. Since I was a lazy bastard (always have been) this involving thinking very hard about something somewhat like symmetry groups.
Over the annual summer visit to my grandparents—small town prairie Badlands without the cool geography, though often we managed a trip to see the hoodoos—I played a lot of solitaire on the golden-green shag carpet which Puss Puss—the duodecarian house cat who lived in the shadows under my grandparent's bed (the short duration of our visits was probably for her sake)—sometimes preferred in her dotage over asking out into the Canadian winter. Quite undeterred by the sticky and/or stinky patches, I managed to clearly formulate the concept of a "decision procedure" and that such a thing could be unambiguously specified; furthermore, I worked out (at first empirically) that the greedy algorithm was provably not optimal for Klondike (for me at that time, all Solitaire was just "Solitaire", though I knew several).
At age ten, the boundary between empiricism and proof is still a fuzzy one.
In grade five, I spent a lot of time (by myself) trying to puzzle out the rate-limiting step in long-hand square root. I had by then also discovered E=IR and P=IE. Pretty soon I had determined that this generates 4 choose 1 times 4 choose 2 simple algebraic forms. But for an entire painful week, some kind of thick cloud entered my brain and I couldn't reliably write all the forms down without a lot of mucking around; this I knew to be completely bogus, and a permanent blot on my record. By the time the cloud passed, I was pretty good at substitution and gathering. Later, when I first encountered a matrix (don't recall), I immediately went to myself "oh, that's just algebra, better organized". At least something stuck.
Now, during this entire period of my life, I was in a constant state of deeply repressed rage about this thing called "school", with all the inherent stimulation of Puss Puss waiting out the daily bedtime / ultimate final departure of the grandchildren (geriatric cat yay!) from the furthest dark remove under the master bed.
Grade six came as a shock. For the first time I experienced a math teacher who believed in letting kids learn at their own natural rate. He quickly put four of us a private work program. We could go as fast as we wanted, but the rule was we had to do all of the tedious exercises at the end of every chapter. Many of these exercises were heavy on the pencil work, so I only made it through grades six, seven, eight, and nine. My fingers put in about 90% of the work (this is not actually a bad thing), and my brain put in the other 10% (this being 100 times more than 0.1%). Awesome!
So I was armed, locked, and loaded for bear when I showed up at the beginning of grade seven. I figured I could knock off ten, eleven, twelve by Easter, and still have a month left over for real math at long last.
Problem: my grade seven teacher thought my purpose in life was to sit enthralled by his boring lectures. Shields up! I don't recall a single thing he wrote on the board
I remember elementary and high school math from the 80s and early 90s. It was an endless cycle of memorization of procedures and formulas, with very little emphasis on the real utility of it all. In particular, I remember plane geometry proofs that barely made sense to me -- I can't imagine what someone who was bad at math or disinterested thought of those. That, and the algebra manipulation phase (factoring, quadratic equations, etc.) I will always remember that x = (-b +/- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / 2a -- for some reason. :-)
Here's a question for math lovers -- what needs to be taught differently in early math so that students will enjoy it? I know the only time I ever got interested in math was later on, using it in science courses to solve actual problems. Everything before that was just operations. The problem was that being behind in math kept me from doing well in engineering coursework. Contrast this with my eventual degree in chemistry -- I had a great high school chemistry teacher and really caught onto it immediately, probably because it wasn't as math heavy until physical chemistry and analysis courses. Most people barely understand chemistry and consider it something they pass once and never see again. Is it really just as simple as good initial teaching? What makes math interesting?
The problem with education is that it focuses on teaching subjects to students instead of teaching students HOW to learn. If schools would focus on teaching kids how to learn, how to reason things out, and how to research, the knowledge would come naturally from their innate curiosity. Of course, schools should guide their learning to make sure they get some minimum acceptable level of training in basics like math, grammar, history, etc.
From the article:
"Participation in math camps, after-school or weekend math "academies," and math competitions has surged in recent years, with many programs having long wait lists."
Common core and the Chicago math are so bad and cause so much frustration that a lot of parents are getting outside tutoring. After talking to a couple of private math tutors, I would say about 20-30% of my kid's peers in a middle class suburban Chicago neighborhood. I also know an executive at Kuman and their business is booming. I would bet money the kids excelling in these contests are, ironically, excelling because common core sucks so bad people are fleeing it.
If you ever want to hear parents bitch about their kid's education just ask about grade school math.
Okay they won in 2015, congrats! But these are their results going back to '74 when they first participated:
1 2 3 3 2 3 6 3 5 5 2 2 3 3 2 3 10 3 4 2 11 1 7 2 5 3 5 6 5 1 2 4 2 3 1 5 2 1 3 3 2
They pretty much always were top 3. Looking at other countries, only China has a better track-record coming in 1st often. Other countries placing well historically are Russia and South-Korea, but on average the US seems to do better (historically I would say 2nd after China).
So really, the are making a moot point. It's like saying the US must have really fit and healthy people, since they win a lot of medals at the Summer Olympics.
http://tucson.com/news/local/e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's rich. It seems that every ten years or so some person or group finds a way to revolution math or math education. Yet, nothing changes except for American education being dumbed down more with every "revolution".
Judging by the number of individuals who seem to be unable to learn when to use "its", "it's", "whose", "who's", etc. a basic literacy revolution might be welcome. How can you actually get a high-school diploma without ever mastering something as straightforward as that?
A country of brainy maths geeks??? Wow... Can only be a good thing I suppose as the dollars in the red keep pilling up for the nation... someone needs to make sense of the countries financial maths
Well lived, well enjoyed
I would hesitate to call "wealthy parents have better options for the education of their children" a revolution. It's pretty much the way it's always been.
Clearly you need to do a bit more research. Common core isn't about methods or techniques at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The standards do not dictate any particular pedagogy or what order topics should be taught within a particular grade level."
http://www.corestandards.org/a...
"That is why these standards establish what students need to learn but do not dictate how teachers should teach. Instead, schools and teachers will decide how best to help students reach the standards."
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My daughter is a product of public school education. In the 4th grade the math teacher and gifted teacher recognized her math ability. She had already skipped a grade, and then she started skipping math. She graduated public high school at age 15 and is now in college. A 5 on AP Calc, and more summer calc, means after her first year of college, she is finished with all engineering math including differential equations.
Involved parents, and involved teachers is what it takes, but it helps if parents are educated too and can understand that keeping a child challenged is better then straight A's (though in our case she still graduated with honors, 10th in class, and over a 4.0). We never did after school or summer programs. My daughter has an aptitude for math, but her parents did too, she just surpassed us.
And yes, better math skills, usually lead to better college and eventually better income.
Ah, now I get it. Looking at that picture it's suddenly clear that it's all of the brilliant black and brown students reinvigorating American mathematics and rescuing it from the stupid white and Asian kids that have been keeping America behind the rest of the world.
Stop lying.
Stop lying.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm impressed that 1/3 of that team is white... was expecting all Asians.
Isaac Newton died a virgin. nuff said.
Baaaaaa
More schools are taking out the smart kids and putting them in better programs. Only revolution I see.