Interesting Article I just red today. Another reason to start early with Math and get kids to love math!
US schools are so pitiful. With our wealth, we should be able to do better. My son is so far behind in math. I am trying to re-mediate the problem at home. He has some learning issues. His school thinks he is just low average and that I am over-reacting. I don’t think they practice the basics enough. They are more concerned with kids understanding concepts rather than actually memorizing their math facts. The teachers are required to introduce so many different concepts that mastery gets lost.
Lori
America ranks 2nd or 3rd in education spending in the world. Obviously, we aren’t getting our money’s worth. You’re right that math is not mastery focused at all in this country. Bill Gates said that Asian math textbooks are a third of the size of American textbooks. They teach less but teach it really well. But this is true of all subjects in the US. E.D. Hirsch writes about this problem in his book The Knowledge Deficit. Basically schools usually don’t have any knowledge curriculum and teach a lot of random, disconnected topics. If you want kids to learn something well, you have to stay on that topic and similar topics over time. That way, they are constantly exposed to similar concepts and their knowledge and vocabulary for that topic grows.
Even just judging from my own experience, – I studied in Europe, former Soviet Union, we were expected a mastery, our math was VERY difficult, but I loved it, I was not the best in the class ( we had some geniuses, for real!), but I finished school with medal of honor and I did specialized math studies as a senior, – loved it, but when I met my peers from US, they though that I was genius, haha…
It isn’t just the US! It is the same here in the UK, too.
I remember when I first went to Russia, I stayed with a boy who was in year 9 and doing work that we didn’t start until sixth form (year 12/13). He was in the advanced maths group, but then so was I at his age! I remember spending years 8 and 9 sat in the back of the classroom chatting, because I’d done the 10 examples on the board almost as soon as the teacher had written them, and was told by the teacher that I shouldn’t disrupt the lesson by asking for more work. At one point, I was actually told off for doing homework (continue working for half an hour on textbook questions) because I got too far ahead of the class!
Then in year 10 we were given calculators and nobody even tried to use their brains anymore. Times tables went out the window when it was quicker to push buttons. Even super-simple addition was done with the help of a calculator, by sheer laziness. This was the start of the complete destruction of my mental aritmatic skills, which I am now having to re-learn.
Personally, I think calculators should be banned until University - just because they are quicker, doesn’t mean it is a good idea to give them to kids (I know some schools that give calculators at year 7, or even earlier!!!). There is very little that can’t be done without one, if you take the time and learn your maths facts well.
I also studied math in Russia while in school. My Russian college degree is not related to math, so I only had math in school (it’s a different system where you don’t study subjects not related to your major while in college). When I moved to US and started taking college classes trying to change professions, I had to take a lot of math, and to my surprise, I realized that I already knew most of it from high school math. So, what I am trying to say is that perhaps math courses in schools here need to be more advanced. I totally agree about banning calculators because then you end up so dependent on them that you can’t calculate a 20% tip in your head, and I’ve met a lot of people like that. The article is also right about teaching profession having more respect in other countries, as well as math itself being more respected. I actually taught SAT math prep course one summer for a local public school, and my students kept asking me to play math games with them and were not expecting to do any math home work. Totally different culture. I’m not saying that math should be boring, but you can’t explain every concept through a game nor can you achive true mastery. And, yes, Russian system priortized mastery and depth over width. I still have some of old Russian math text books, and they are slim and light.