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."

Comments

Education is getting better

[110010001000]

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!

Re:Education is getting better

[AthanasiusKircher]

I disagree. In fact had the opposite effect: New Math as taught in the late 1970s/early 1980s was unsuccessful in teaching pre-college math.

Sorry, but I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. The New Math in secondary education was developed in the 1950s and implemented in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, the New Math movement was largely dead.

By replacing basic Math education like algebra/geometry with the screwed up "New Math" they ruined math for those of us who actually had to take it in college for engineering. You can't learn Calculus without a solid understanding of Algebra and Geometry.

I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. In the mid-1950s, high school enrollment in Algebra was down to about 25% of all high students, and enrollment in Geometry was down to less than 12% of high school students. The New Math was about encouraging students to take such courses, by combatting an anti-intellectual populism in the previous generation of educational reformers. It also encouraged clarity in concepts and algorithms in these classes which would line up better with advanced math taught in college. Also, the very idea of teaching calculus in high school was a product of the New Math reform.

New Math didn't teach what we needed to know to be successful in college math.

Without the reform of New Math curricula in the 1950s and 1960s, you may not have even had the option of taking math like geometry or algebra in high school, let alone calculus. How would missing out on such things be better preparation for college math??

I think you're focusing too much on the reforms to primary education, and you don't seem to know what secondary New Math curricular reform was about. It was mostly about emphasizing the math you think claim it was jettisoning from curricula.

I'd suggest you read about what the New Math reform actually was about. Here's a short intro to curricular reforms over the 20th century, here's a longer history of the New Math movement, and here's an intro to the sorry state of secondary math education in the U.S. around 1950 -- which definitely included little decent prep in geometry or algebra. One of the main goals of the New Math reform was to incorporate "a solid understanding of Algebra and Geometry" into the U.S. high school. At times, the reformers did go too far into abstraction, but I'm really not sure what you're talking about.

Re: Education is getting better

[Bengie]

the common core scam (which is incompatible with logic-based mathematics), kids can no longer fail regardless of performance

Common Core tests have a high failure rate because of the much higher goals. You're conflating so called "Common Core curriculum" which is sold by private companies with the standardized Common Core progression benchmarks. Any test can be "Common Core" as long as it closely aligns with the Common Core benchmarks. How the tests are done or how the curriculum is taught has nothing to do with "Common Core" except marketing.

Journey to the Center of Dearth

[epine]

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