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- Math = Rigour + Relatable
"Math is too much answer time and not enough learning time."
I am a product of the Singapore education system. We are damn good at math. I hated math at school, but I'll take that over the no man's land that is K12 math in the United States.
Florida recently rejected dozens of math textbooks because of “unsolicited addition of S.E.L.”. First of all, good teachers incorporate S.E.L. in their classroom, whether or not it’s spelt out in textbooks. More importantly, this seems like the wrong battle to fight.
What’s at stake here is not culture war conversations about the impact of S.E.L on critical race theory etc. What’s at stake here is how American students are doing in math. Plain and simple.
In 2018, math performance remained below average for the United States, compared to the rest of the world. The gap between students from high and low income households is astonishingly wide. According to PISA test data, only 10 countries have a wider gap than the United States.
Young children are taught to use visualisation techniques to solve math problems - helps them see the connection between abstract concepts and visual representations.
In the 2018 PISA study, Singapore ranked #2 globally for math, ahead of the United States at #37. Singapore math is world famous.
There is a lot of rigour.
But when I was a kid, I struggled to see how any of the math I learn is useful in the real world. To me, math was about formulas, drills and practice papers. Like most Singaporean kids, I got pretty good at math just by spending copious amount of time on it. The strong foundation in math helped me breeze through the math modules in college. I have a first class honours in economics from UCL. Don't think I've ever used much of the math I learnt in school and at college.
Julie Gainsburg pointed out that the traditional K-12 math curriculum is focused on performing computational manipulations. Does little to prepare students for the problem-solving demands of the high-tech workplace.
“Lots of people think knowledge is what we want, and I don’t believe that, because knowledge is astonishingly transitory. We don’t employ people as knowledge bases, we employ people to actually do things or solve things. So I want flexibility and continuous learning. I need teamworking. And part of teamworking is communications.”
School classrooms should give children a sense of the nature of mathematics.
Provide opportunities for students to ask questions, set up and interpret models, and develop independent thinking. If teachers pose and extend problems of interest to students, they enjoy math more, feel more ownership of their work, and ultimately learn more. When children are working on their own ideas, their work is enriched with cognitive complexity and enhanced by greater motivation.
"If a math teacher challenges the curiosity of his students by setting them problems proportionate to their knowledge, and helps them to solve their problems with stimulating questions, he may give them a taste for, and some means of, independent thinking."
Instead of arguing about whether there’s a place for social emotional learning in math textbooks, how about just focusing on helping kids learn math more effectively?
Find the right balance between rigour and making math relatable to learners.
The current debate does neither.
“The culture war right now has nothing to do with whether these kids learn mathematics, and it’s irrelevant and a waste of time.”
This thread is inspired by Jess Grose's New York Times Opinion article ‘I Just Want My Kid To Learn Algebra’ and references Jo Boaler’s book 'What's Math Got To Do With It?'.
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