Traditional Rigorous Mathematics!

This mathematician gets it. Its not about leveling the field. Its not as he says, pitching 35 mph - it wont get you to the major leagues.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Ridgewood
• BOE
• TERC
• math
• reform
• education

[motherFunctor]

wow. This guy's speech is great, but now I want more of the story. What is the board meeting about?

[nowthatshockey]

District had rolled out TERC Investigations to only 2 of 6 elementary schools - leaving 2 schools with Addison Wesley, 2 with Addison Wesley supplemented with Everyday Math (although district promoted those schools as everyday math schools)

[sleeper2345]

Unfortunately the title of this video is an oxymoron. Traditional mathematics in the US is not rigorous. Students learn rules without reasons, thus lacking the rigor that is needed. However, most adults in the US do not recognize mathematical rigor because they have never seen it.

[nda340]

You aim to win and to try to be the best, even if you don't intend to pursue it professionally. Furthermore, math pervades the social sciences, business, finance, and more. Even if you study art history, some traditional math will instill an understanding of rigorous thought.

[babamuna66]

You can make elementary school kids memorize algorithms and they'll try, just to please you. Many will succeed. But in junior high and high school they will all of a sudden want to know why they're doing this and most curricula (worldwide) are not set up to teach "top down." I think students would put in a lot more effort and could really be challenged if they were taught what these algorithms are really used for. Most mathematicians/teachers/profs don't know or care about the applications.

[AnonymousElektron]

@sleeper2345 you learn the rules before you can learn the reasons.

[jelewis2]

Understanding the standard algorithms, methods that always work and proceed by a series of simple steps, is necessary for competence in arithmetic.

Being "major league" involves all that and a great degree of mathematical creativity, like performing u-substitution or using comparison test or Laplace transforms. This type of discovery learning is best done by each student while grappling with the problems, and only once there is no longer one best way to get the answer.

[jelewis2]

The standard algorithms are key to understanding how the arithmetic operations work, helping students develop that number sense by using (albeit not in an obvious manner) the distributive property and our place-value system to see how the operations work with any number of digits or decimal places.

The main thing I believe should be left in the dust from the old times is the emphasis on drill without understanding; that easily turns off those students who don't "get it" right away.

[jelewis2]

I'll admit I'm more in the "math is fun" camp, but that's only when you actually understand it. I believe that difficult problems are necessary to demonstrate that the standard algorithms work in all cases; in general there is no way to get around a large number of steps that sometimes seem monotonous.

[jelewis2]

Those devices are more interesting than a first glance lets on, but they're most useful for students who have learned how to work with logarithms; meanwhile if reform math were around back in the '30s, their use would have been introduced in elementary school because it's too hard to multiply numbers by working out the standard algorithm.

BTW pilots still use a circular slide rule known as an E6B while training and as backup in case the plane loses power and trajectory calculations are needed

[Maty31]

how dare he cut the guy off. what a piece of shyt. shut

 up asshole. hes right.

[8peregrint8]

hahaha lets get out our slide rules too bub