Why Johnny Can't Add

From my article in the Summer edition of the Classical Teacher magazine, "Why Johnny Can't Add":

This is one of the most controversial aspects of modern math pedagogy: the complicated way in which it proposes to teach simple arithmetic. This is not an accident and is, in fact, very intentional. The idea behind this “multiple strategies” approach is to intentionally complicate the process of learning arithmetic in order to force the student to think about the procedures he is learning. The more strategies employed to teach a child to solve simple arithmetic problems, goes the reasoning, the better off he will be. 

This is exactly the opposite approach to that taken by traditional educators. If we were to haul the teacher in my father’s one-room schoolhouse into a modern math classroom, her first impression would be that the education world had been turned upside down. She would wonder why we had completely over-complicated a simple procedure. And if we were to tell her that the reason we were doing it was to get children to understand arithmetic better, she would get out the dunce cap and put us on a stool in the corner.

Read the entire article here.

The Classical Reason for Calculus

From my post today at Exordium, the blog of the Classical Latin School Association:

 In a recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Tianhui Michael Li and Allison Bishop question the utility of teaching calculus in high school. The reason? There are other fields of mathematics better suited for preparing a student for the job market.

... The irony is that classical education, whose purpose, along with passing on a common culture, is to train the mind, is the only philosophy of education that can provide a justification for calculus. Why study it? Because it will help a student to think better.

Read the rest here.

The Tolerance Police get another one wrong

Roger Clegg at Phi Beta Cons points out that in the New York Times' recent story on the National Science Foundation study finding that there is no gap in average math scores between boys and girls got Lawrence Summers wrong. The story claims that the study repudiates Summers, the former president of Harvard University who was run off from the university in a fit of ideological uniformity when Summers had the audacity to point out that males and females are different.

Summers had noted that boys and girls have different math capabilities, but, Clegg points out, not that their average scores were different, as the New York Times suggests. What Summers had said was not that the average scores of boys were higher than that of girls, as the National Science Federation study apparently found (at least that is what the Times' story seems to suggest), but that, while girls' scores are clumped in the middle, boys scores fell out on the extremes: that boys are both the best at math and the worst.

The moral of the story is that, if you question any of the central dogmas of the Tolerance Police, you can count on the fact that they won't care whether their charges have any basis in reality or not.

The United States: Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average

If you can't beat 'em, stop comparing yourselves to 'em. This is a favorite motto among Bill Bennett used to call the "Blob"--that established body of educrats that runs our government schools.

The latest example of this is the now not so quiet act by the United States to drop out of an international study that compares the math and science skills of students in different countries. Called TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study) Advanced 2008, the study has increasingly shown the sorry state of math and science education in this country, according to Newsweek magazine.

The interesting thing is that this strategy will probably work--if, by "working", we mean that it will make us look better. Kentucky did this in the 1990's when, under the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA), it stopped using standardized tests to measure student achievement and began using its own test, called the KIRIS test (now titled "CATS")--a test that measured Kentucky students, not against students in other states, but only against themselves. This resulted in the appearance of progress among Kentucky students when the data gathered from tests many students still took told a different story.

Now the U. S. will not have to answer questions about those embarrassing results showing us scoring lower than every country except for Cyprus and South Africa.

And they wonder why home schooling is becoming so popular.