Maggie's Farm

Don't Blame the Teachers - Years of misguided curricular theories are at the core of America’s educational shortcomings.
That might be just one part of the issue. As a victim of The New Math, I can relate.

Re New Math: I took New Math in high school. I loved it. The New Math version I took was Max Beberman's "Illinois Math." Beberman's Illinois Math was tried out on University of Illinois faculty brats. While it worked well for faculty brats, one might wonder how a curriculum applied to bright kids would work for the population as a whole. At my high school, Illinois Math was used for ~ the brighter 1/2 or 1/4 of the class. Even within that elect set, a substantial proportion- even most of the classes -found Illinois Math, which began proofs in 9th grade, to be too much. The class President my junior year, who was a solid B student when Bs had to be earned, wrote "No more math misery" in my yearbook.

A further problem with the mass application of New Math, which one saw in elementary school where many teachers are not very capable in math, was that its precepts were not necessarily followed. At the elementary level, many teachers assumed that New Math meant that basic multiplication and division skills didn't have to be taught any more. That was NOT the intent of Max Beberman. I took a geometry class in college with a prof who had met Beberman. My prof told me he had asked Beberman if he intended for basic multiplication and division skills to be de-emphasized or ignored. Beberman's reply was, "Absolutely not."

That New Math didn't work well in the hands of elementary school teachers who weren't very good at math is NOT the fault of the teachers. Those designing the New Math programs for elementary school should have taken the capabilities of those teachers into account.

Summation: just because a new program works on a small population doesn't meant that it will work with different population and when applied en masse.


I absolutely hated the Junior Literary Critic model used in my high school and college English classes.IMHO, literarcy criticism is not the right vehicle for teaching composition. Nicholson Baker, who has authored a number of books, wrote Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids. Nicholson found out that literary criticism had arrived even at the elementary school level. One would think that a published author would like students being taught a heavy dose of literary criticism. But no. He places the blame where it should lie- on the educational theorists. I would add that it isn't only the less capable students who dislike the Junior Literary Critic model.

A further problem with educational theories is that Ed Schools are not so much concerned with teaching prospective teachers what works as deduced from over 2,000 years of formal instruction, as they are with disseminating the GREATEST NEW EDUCATIONAL THEORY THAT WILL EXPLAIN IT ALL. Before said theory has been thoroughly tested, it is tried out on Ed School students, who then proceed to try it out or not try it out in their classrooms. Five to ten years later, there will arrive the next unproven theory to replace the old and now discredited theory.Ed Schools are also big on the newest PC dogma.

There is a place for pedagogy, as it is not intuitively obvious what approach will work for a given subject and a given population.

I christened the New Math curriculum "Discovery Math"...the students were expected to figure it out, ie Discover, math on their own.

Discovery learning has long been considered a Good Thing by the educational theorists in the Ed Schools. It turns out the research isn't as supportive as the theorists have told us.American Educator: Putting Students on the Path to Learning: The Case for Fully Guided Instruction. By the same authors, here is an article from Educational Psychologist:Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.

That being said, I had an experience w Discovery Learning in high school math, though it came about by serendipity. I was well grounded in multiplication and division before I hit New Math. In 9th grade I learned about the distributive principle: (a+b)X c= ac+bc. I discovered on my own that this could be applied to estimating: 61X7= 60X7+1X7~60X7. This helped me become a good estimator. But as this was by serendipity, this points out the problem of using Discovery Learning. As the quote points out, discovery doesn't work well with run of the mill students.

This also brings forth a bad point about our education theorists. Time and again they will push a new method which hasn't been proven, and quite often subsequent research shows the new method didn't work as the theorists claimed it would. Quite often? Nearly always.

I don't want to misquote John Saxon but I think he said the so-called New Math cost us two generations of mathematicians.

Regarding what effect New Math had on elementary students, I have no idea, but I doubt it was helpful, as most elementary teachers lacked the math skills to teach New Math. And yes, it was a mistake from the higher-ups to have teachers not competent in math, which describes a lot of elementary school teachers, to teach New Math.

I doubt that New Math cost two generations of mathematicians for those who were first exposed to New Math in junior high or in high school. My experience with New Math was that the top-tier students did quite well with it, and liked it. They could handle the proofs from day one that New Math demanded- at least the Illinois Math [UICSM] that I took demanded. It was the students below the top tier[s] who had problems with New Math. Mathematicians are going to come from the top tier, no?