The More Things Change, Dept.

The Internet Archive/Wayback Machine is a portal into photos, articles, blogs, etc that have appeared on the internet, many of which have long been deleted. I recently visited the Archive to see if I could find an old article I wrote that was published in the long defunct Education News.

I found it. It was called “Mathematics Education: Being Outwitted by Stupidity” The main premise of the article is stated at the beginning:

I believe that what is offered as treatment for math learning disabilities is what we could have done—and need to be doing—in the first place. While there has been a good amount of research and effort into early interventions in reading and decoding instruction, extremely little research of equivalent quality on the learning of mathematics exists. Given the education establishment’s resistance to the idea that traditional math teaching methods are effective, this research is very much needed to draw such a definitive conclusion about the effect of instruction on the diagnosis of learning disabilities.

When this snapshot was taken, there were sixty comments; the article received about eighty comments ultimately. What I find remarkable is that most of the arguments raised by those protesting my views are not too much different than those offered today. I found this one particularly interesting:

Still unaddressed: your mistaken identification of traditional with RTI, and indeed, the necessity of kicking the quite dead horse of the Math Wars. Math educators have moved on. We are living in a post-NCLB world, where the shortfalls of purely “drill and kill” were highlighted and a sensible return to a middle ground represented by the new Common Core standards is upon us.

What is intriguing to me is the notion that the “math wars” are now dead, behind us, not worth mentioning; we’ve moved on. Actually we haven’t. In the past year, for example, math reformers who fear that a “Sold a Story” about math might come about, have been drawing wagons in a circle, stating “Inquiry-based math uses explicit instruction” as well as other aspects of traditional math. (Not mentioned, at least not very loudly, is that while explicit instruction is offered, it comes at the end of an inquiry or “problem-based” session after a substantial amount of “struggle” (viewed as productive) has occurred.) Similar statements are made in these comments.

I flag one more for your review. It is an impassioned argument about how wrong I am. Other commenters responded about how wrong the commenter was, to be sure, but I highlight this because this type of thinking has not gone away. Nor does it appear to be going away any time soon, despite protestations that “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”

“Understanding without skills,” is a straw man, just as you complain that “skills without understanding” is a misnomer. The majority of students in this country are NOT taught in reform style, so low current achievement numbers are not an indictment of reform. Reform mathematics is not some willy-nilly experiment – curricula are tested and researched before being released, as opposed to traditional curricula that often just spring forth from the author’s mind.

Ask people whether they like math. They don’t. Ask whether they are good at math. They aren’t. Asking university professors whether they liked traditional teaching is like the following: a medical trial is performed with a new drug. 98% die from complications, but 2% are cured. Interviewing the 2% to see how they liked it is foolish.

Math teachers and university professors are the 2%. (I am one.) We’re the ones for whom it worked. Ask us about it if you wish, but don’t base policy on us. Base policy on the vast majority of people we have ruined for math, and also for many this means science, too, and the resulting lack of STEM professionals.