Parents Rise Up Against A New Approach to Math

I can see what the textbook authors intended here, I think. There's not a whole lot of point to memorizing multiplication tables, it's much more useful to be able to work out arithmetic in your head. The way described here (going to multiples of ten and adding) is pretty close to the way I do it (going to prime factors and then multiplying back). Probably the authors wanted to teach what my grade school teachers called "mental math", which sounds like a worthy goal to me.<p>What's impossible to tell without looking at the textbook is, are the parents resisting because they equate math with memorization, or because the textbook fails to teach "mental math"? The article is slanted a bit toward the latter, and I was looking forward to reading it and laughing at the dumb textbook writers along with it, but I'm not so sure.<p>I love the picture on the article, also. The kid, sort of dopey and puzzled-looking, and the father, with the sad look on his face, far in the background, out of focus, powerless to help... It's perfect.

While there are many problems with the education system, this is why I don't get opposition to vouchers. There are lots of ways to teach. School districts don't adapt to their customers - they use homogeneous systems with at best 1 or 2 levels of differentiation. Wouldn't competition be good?

Summary: School system alters math curriculum for students. Parents, being naturally curious, read up on the relevant academic research into math pedagogy using ERIC and JSTOR. The parents listed the pros and cons of each curriculum, carefully comparing the two options. Then, just to be sure, they cross-validated their findings with the latest research in cognitive development and educational theory.<p>While realizing that science is an ongoing and imperfect process, they were sufficiently convinced of their correctness to proceed with creating an informative and emotionally compelling website to spread their newfound knowledge.

I just thought of a way to make sure the kids never get stumped. The kid in the article was stuck breaking up 674 into easier numbers. Perhaps there is a method of "breaking the problem into easier-to-digest numbers" that <i>always works</i>.<p>Hmm, we could break up 674 as 600+70+4, and 249 as 200+40+9. I think this method just might work for <i>all numbers</i>!<p>Now I just need a catchy name to market this. How about "Child-friendly Mathematics: a -4'th century approach"? It's even diversity friendly (crucial in the education market), since it was invented by a non-western culture.

The new approach may be okay so long as the book is accurate. All too often school boards default to a more error prone book, due to a connection to a specific marketer.<p>Feynman on school books: <a href="http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm</a>

It's hard for me to get too wound up about an issue for which there is literally an episode of the Cosby Show.

The article didn't really make clear what the point is of the new new math. Is it to provide a deeper understanding of number theory? Or is it to provide different algorithms that don't require memorization of the multiplication table?<p>Not that I know anything about math education, but how hard is it, really, to understand that 3 x 7 means that you add 3 together 7 times? Once you understand that, you understand the fundamental "meaning" of multiplication.<p>Granted, adding 3 together 7 times is the long and tedious way to do it and there are handy shortcuts, but do we really need to understand how the shortcuts work in order to use them effectively? Besides, based on the [biased] reports given in the article, it would seem that the kids don't really understand the mechanism behind the new methods either.<p>It would, however, be nice to do away with memorizing the multiplication table. And maybe it really can be done with only a slight increase in algorithmic complexity. If that's the case, then I imagine this is just the age-old gripe of parents not knowing how to help their kids with their homework.

Conceptual learning is fine, but you have to memorize some base cases. I don't think about 9 x 9. I just know it's 81. If you have to think about that every time, you'll be so slow at doing anything. At the same time, learn multiplication too. You should know how to do 637 x 59 if you have to.

Take a look at this video. You will see why parents think this new textbook is just not good enough. It discusses the 'new math' and textbook mentioned in the video:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119317" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=119317</a><p>No wonder kids from other countries are excelling at math...