Just a taste of the ideas of the father of modern US Education
The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat. Indeed, almost the only measure for success is a competitive one – in a bad sense of that term – a comparison of results or in the examination to see which child has succeeded in getting ahead of others in storing up, in accumulating, the maximum of information.
John Dewey – The School and Society
Or, to paraphrase: One student learning faster than the rest is a threat to the teacher and the class structure. Teach the student only what he “needs” to learn to fit into society. While doing so, make learning so abhorrent to him that he will refuse to strike out on his own to learn that which he doesn’t “need” for societal integration. Such excessive learning will create an unpliable citizen.
Apparently, the Seattle School District doesn’t believe that most students will need to learn higher math functions
With the program adoption, Seattle Public Schools will move away from its integrated math curriculum and standardize its math classrooms by using just one program.
The controversy surrounded Key Curriculum’s Discovering Mathematics series for algebra, advanced algebra and geometry, which officials describe as using an inquiry-based learning method. In a nutshell, the series focuses on helping students uncover math concepts on their own instead of laying out rules for memorization.
Instead of “rules for memorization”, the students get to sift through the lab book, searching for the rules of algebra and geometry and then figure out a way to memorize them themselves.
Lovely.
The state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction has called the Discovering series “mathematically unsound.” A state Board of Education report states, about the series, “Students learn to solve interesting problems but not to understand algebra.”
The education board also said the Discovering series places too much emphasis on “pictures of graphs” instead of the algebraic equations that go with them.
But other mathematicians, contracted by the state, have said the opposite — that the Discovering series indeed is mathematically sound and is effective for teaching students with a wide range of learning styles.
“It’s kind of a case of dueling experts,” de la Fuente said.
In its study, the OSPI ended up choosing the Discovering series as its second choice, behind a program published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. All of the OSPI’s recommendations, including the Discovering series, align with the state’s educational standards, it said.
The Seattle schools Board of Directors on Wednesday only had the power to approve or reject the Seattle math committee’s recommendation. The committee worked for about six months, combing through 20 textbooks until settling on three finalists. It then came to a consensus on the Key Curriculum and Addison-Wesley textbooks.
“I believe that the Discovering texts have (a) sufficiently broad approach to allow a range of teaching,” said board Director Peter Maier, who voted for the adoption.
A range so wide that no one will learn, unfortunately.
You can’t “make math fun” enough that most students are going to want to learn it. Making its concepts more vague, thereby causing the student to sit for hours in the classroom, confused and frustrated, will only fail the stated objective of a school: To teach.
Board President Michael DeBell previously said he was not satisfied with the Discovering textbooks because they can’t be used as well as other options as reference materials at home. He voted against the math committee’s recommendation.
Most people who gave public testimony at recent board meetings were widely opposed to the Discovering series. Many said it teaches “fuzzy math” and criticized it for departing from teaching methods that have been used for centuries.
“The effort to reform math into something it is not is failure,” Seattle resident Kate Martin said. “And SPS is getting on that train.”
Catherine Costello, the only person to give testimony in favor of the Discovering series, said she feels it promotes open communication in the classroom and values students as valid thinkers.
When it comes to complex mathematical theorems, what students “think” doesn’t matter. Mathematics is, quite literally, a Zero Sum game. You either know its rules or you don’t. You either solve the problem or you don’t.
“Discovering has a progressive, egalitarian focus,” said Costello, the mother of a freshman at Nathan Hale High School. “The direction is to teach both ideas and skills.”
Not everyone is equally curious or equally intuitive, Ms. Costello. You’re high school freshman child is not going to discover a revolutionary new shortcut to solving algebraic equations while sitting in Row Two, Desk Four if he/she doesn’t have a groundwork to jump off from.For millennia, people as smart as Alfred Einstein have been fiddling with Algebra and Geometry, using its lessons to send people to the moon and machinery to Mars and beyond.
Judging from the attitude of the Seattle School Board’s ideas about instruction, as well as the District’s latest test scores, Little Billy/Suzie will be lucky if their brains don’t melt like shit out of their ears while attempting to convert American SAE to Metric with a pencil and paper. None of them is going to win the Nobel Prize in Mathematics before graduation.
I think I’m going to have to include a second quote today, this time from a local Mathematics Education blog
Seattle has chosen to mathematically disable the children for the next decade by using the Discovering Series from Key Curriculum Press.
Typical nonsense triumphs once again.
Dan Dempsey – The Math Underground
I’m glad that I dont’ have children I’d be forced to abuse in this way, and glad I no longer live in Seattle. Getting proper change back from the buger flipping cashier is hard enough in Tacoma.
There is something to be said for learning through discovery, and I think math education can be served that way, but not in a high density classroom setting. Such learning requires careful guidance so the student does not get frustrated and give up. It requires a student-to-teacher ratio of something on the order of 5:1.
I learned Calculus through a discovery method, but I was in a class of 15, and we were all adults with a strong background in Algebra. We had the intellectual tools to learn that way. Kids don’t.
Dewey was an asshole.
“You can’t make Socialists out of individualists – children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.”
-John Dewey
Add subtract multiply and divide do simple exponents(yes with fractions) by seventh grade at the latest. This means that we have to break the teachers guild. Not the unions per say,but the guild. The education system determines who the educators are. I slipped through the cracks and taught math at a major university as a lowly adjunct for three years. I was successful. The majority of my students passed my class. Most importantly they passed subsequent classes. I am not qualified to teach at a high school though, no degree. I haven’t been taught “how to teach” you see. Good at it:yes. Department adopted some of my classroom policies, Ok.
No EDUCATION classes? Outcast.