New New Math Or Fuzzy Math?

To the Editor,

In your April 14 issue we read that “Parents Learn How Math Is Taught At Sandy Hook” – and in 49 states. Says the teacher, math today is taught differently from “the basic skills of adding and subtract[ing]…”

l Translation: By the third grade, these children may still have not advanced beyond adding two numbers to two numbers, or subtracting one number from two numbers. They will never have facility with fractions. Orders from Hartford say they should de-emphasize “irrelevant” fractions like 4/7 and 5/9.

l Multiplying? Perish the thought. By the third grade, these children will be learning how to multiply two or three digits by one single digit, and dividing two or three digits by only one digit.

l “We’re teaching students how to solve problems as opposed to rote memorization.” Translation: These children will never be asked to memorize the multiplication table. Then how will they be able to do long division? They won’t. It will be left to the calculator. Parents will be lucky if their kindergartners get through the year without being introduced to calculators…

The geniuses who devised this new system, called “new-New Math” or, in the words of professional, real mathematicians, “Fuzzy Math” or “Whole Math” – drawing a parallel to Whole Language, a failed-but-still-popular method of teaching reading – those math educators have dumbed down the math curriculum because they believe that girls and minorities are not smart enough to memorize the multiplication table.

But thanks to the advent of calculators, they don’t have to – the math teaching geniuses reason. A calculator can be put in their hands and the mentally fatiguing long division can be done for them, more efficiently and correctly than with pencil and paper.

Real mathematicians, professional mathematicians, have been railing at this new-New Math for a decade. They say it’s terribly wrong. They say children can learn concepts only as they do lots of drills with pencil and paper till they can perform the simple operations automatically. The new-New Math which the Sandy Hook children are getting will never fit them to become engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. It may never fit them to stop counting on their fingers.

But the good news, which hasn’t yet seeped into the consciousness of the teachers of math, is that their inspired leader, an organization known as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which devised this dumbed-down system around 1989, has announced a return to basics. This reversal of policy came at its national conference in Chicago two weeks ago when it announced a return to basics.

It’s not admitting it will have ruined the math education of ten years (so far) of children. But, though it’s all-powerful in government schools, it has been affected by the endless criticism of it. Readers can dip into the math carcasses created by NCTM on www.mathematicallycorrect.com

Natalie Sirkin

Sherman                                          April 18, 2000