Talk:Math Education Wars





This page is for discussion of ideas from the Math Education Wars page. Both signed and unsigned comments are welcome. Here is an example.

Comment by David Moursund
My guess is that we have another version of the Math Wars in the offing. Our math education system has not yet successfully addressed the issues:

1. Computers can solve most of the math problems that students are learning to solve in school. (This does not mean that computers are good at the task of posing problems or translating "real world" problems into pure math problems.

2. In many situations, computers can teach math better than the average teacher who is teaching math. With proper education and experience, a combination of an average teacher and computer-assisted learning systems can out do either working alone.

Thus, in my opinion, we are headed toward (or, should be headed toward) a "war" about appropriate roles of computers in math curriculum content, teaching, and assessment.

Comment by Carl Yao
The math war has mostly been over, with both sides coming to more and more agreements. As a teacher trained by mostly reform-based professors in college, I used to be in the "left camp," promoting reform-based teaching strategies. However, after 2 years of teaching math, I'm leaning more and more to the right. Some major reasons are:

1. Students expect me to give direct instruction. I'm not considered a good teacher if I don't lecture a lot.

2. Parents pressure the principal and teachers to teach math in the traditional way.

3. Principals set goals like "100% student engagement." But a reform-based classroom will unavoidably see some students waste time during group work. This is unacceptable for many principals.

4. Many students who take reform-based curriculums are not ready to take Pre-Calculus, which requires traditional skills such as factoring and adding up a/b and c/d.

As a result, I'm more and more leaning toward the "right camp" now. There are other problems in implementing standard-based curriculums, such as limited instruction time, a lack of collegue communication and a lack of quality professional development.

Comment by Carl Yao
I'm a high school math teacher. One year in my Geometry class I had my students read Flatland. It was a failure because the language of the book was too difficult for high school students. Also it was because I simply told my students to "read it". If I try it again in my class, I would lead my students to read a paragraph before letting them read the rest. I would also like to learn more strategies in teaching reading. But I don't know whether I will ever get a chance to get this kind of training.

In my Algebra classes, for 3 years in a row I use standard-based curriculums, which are abundent with reading opportunities. However, many students cannot read and simply give up doing the math. As a result, I read the textbook for them and let them know how to do the math. I know I am missing the opportunity to let my students read, but my job is to teach math in the first place. If teaching reading will affect my students to learn math, I would rather not teach reading and focus on the math. That's what I think now. It could change in the future.

Comment by Amanda-UAB EDT630
I have seen first-hand the math wars taking place in my school and in the schools around my area. I currently teach third grade and have previously taught fifth grade math. I personally align with the constructivist theories of teaching mathematics. In my undergraduate instruction and my current masters level classes, I have been presented with research supporting both sides of the "math wars" argument. In my classroom, I place a large emphasis on collaborative problem solving and computational fluency, as well as meeting the standards in a meaningful way. I make my students think about math and figure out the answers to problems in their own mathematically sound methods. I have seen first-hand the benefit of teaching my students in this way. They have become powerful thinkers. They are completely engaged in each task I give them because I try to make it relate to their interests in some way. I have seen children more engaged in my classroom, where they are actively involved in mathematics with a group of students, than in other classrooms where teachers use lecture-based instruction. My students are able to compute mentally, using a variety of strategies. I can see that they have excellent number sense in the way that they take numbers apart and put them back together to make problems easier to solve. My hope for my students is that as they move through different grade levels and the content gets much harder, they take with them the ability to think mathematically. This is far more powerful for them than taking along an algorithm that they will soon forget and have to be taught again each year.