Seattle School Board Rethinks Fuzzy Math Concepts
I'm in fourth grade and doing a lot of math. The people who write the "fuzzy" math books don't care if you get the right answer, they just care that you try to solve the problem in the right way. In my class when I get an answer wrong, it's marked as wrong, and I have to fix it.
In today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer there is a story about how the Seattle School Board is having second thoughts about "reform" math textbooks.
I'm glad that the Seattle School Board is holding off on fuzzy math textbooks. The right answer doesn't always matter, like the moral of a story, but in math, spelling, and grammar, you can't change the way "through" is spelled, or that 4/5=1/5+16/20.
In today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer there is a story about how the Seattle School Board is having second thoughts about "reform" math textbooks.
The two recommended books are "Connected Mathematics Project II," an updated version of the curriculum used in many Seattle middle schools, and "Interactive Mathematics Program" for high schoolers.
Both use a more "conceptual" or "reform" math teaching style, which aims to help students better understand math by helping them reason out concepts themselves. Reform math also emphasizes estimating and being able to analyze whether the answer derived is correct and reasonable.
Proponents of the teaching method say it makes lessons more relevant for students and helps build a solid foundation for studying more advanced math. But critics say the approach lacks the structure and the practice problems necessary to help drive home key math concepts. They would like to see a return to more traditional skill-based curricula.
I'm glad that the Seattle School Board is holding off on fuzzy math textbooks. The right answer doesn't always matter, like the moral of a story, but in math, spelling, and grammar, you can't change the way "through" is spelled, or that 4/5=1/5+16/20.
posted by Maki at 5/12/2006 12:23:00 PM
2 Comments:
Howdy Max. As a kid, we moved around alot in the Air Force and I was always changing schools. Math was hard for me because I missed a ton of the steps needed to go on to the next level. New teachers would get frustrated with me because I just couldn't "see" some things, especially division. So I just started thinking I was no good at it. I had to master it in college, though, so i went all the way back to Intoduction to Algebra. By then I could add, multiply and divide OK, so I was good to go, I thought. The man who taught it was stone deaf and had to read our lips for an answer that he already knew. But he was totally in love with mathematics and by golly, that rubbed off on me. In that stuff, you have all these formula's that you have to write out. In our tests, he would walk by and look at what you were doing and point out that i was solving the problem correctly, but my answer would be wrong. Huh? I am here to teach you Algebra, he'd say, it's not my fault you flunked Arithmetic. So I'd go back and sure enough, I'd have 54 and 67 totalled up wrong. He would quietly smile. I started getting A's and fell in love with math, too. What I found out, is through using the Absolute Logic of math, we discover that in some area's of the world, there is no absolute answer. It bugs you so much, that you learn to try it from another approach, and that doesn't work. So you go another way, and so on. Then you find some guy in a wheelchair found a way, and you check out how he did it. Turns out he had to get "fuzzy" in his thinking and the logic he found changed all the perceptions of the universe. Math makes me use my brain more than anything I ever did, and that is more valuable than gold or ice cream.
Interesting...
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