Hell! Why ruin things?
Just when Manitoba was about to become the world leader in producing little Liberals, along these thugs come and decide to teach them basic math!
I must say, and will say loudly, that memorisation is a good thing. In the first place, if someone memorises something, they know that thing. The second is that memory + knowledge of principles, in science and mathematics, is like a “plywood” that is stronger than the component parts. Canadian children have been turned over to charlatans for a generation, maybe even two generations. It is time to reclaim them.
I am not unfamiliar with Peano’s axioms and other set-theoretic approaches to arithmetic, but I (and no doubt Peano, Bertrand Russell, and even the Bourbaki) think these are useless in grade and even high school. The point is to justify the algorithms and add and multiply tables, and that does not need to be done by everyone.
A typical problem we had to do for our O levels was: given 201 pounds, 19 shillings, and 11pence ha’penny, and interest at 3.6% is due, find the interest in pounds shillings and pence. We had to do a lot of these. If you would like to give it a try, remember that there were 20 shillings to the pound, and 12 pence to the shilling. The method is to convert to pounds and decimal fractions thereof, compute the interest, and then convert the interest back to pounds shillings and pence. Remember, no calculator!
You know you’re in trouble when you pay for a purchase and the clerk can’t make change without benefit of a cash register or calculator. At least you SHOULD know…
I’ve had to teach my kids arithmetic the old fashioned way. They know their multiplication tables, multiplication, long division, fractions, decimals etc. They can usually calculate change and add up the scrabble score in their heads. It’s annoying to have to this AND pay school taxes, but what are you going to do? At least they get a in math.
I heart my calculator:-))))
The idea behind the new math was to base grade school mathematics on the theoretical foundations of mathematical systems – that is, set theory.
What a bizarre idea. In university, even honours students in mathematics study the foundations of mathematics quite sparingly — I know, I was one. Perhaps a few weeks on cardinality and the definition of real numbers, that sort of thing. Physics and engineering students might not study such things at all.
The new math, in other words, seemed to be an attempt to turn grade schoolers into pure mathematicians. I don’t know why they thought that would be a good idea.
There is only one kind of math and I’ve had it to the nth degree. The stupidity was teaching kids to run before they could walk. Just like social studies teaches kids to reason without a knowledge base, new math introduces theoretical concepts before kids can do arithmetic. Both totally fail.
Rote learning produces results. The initial study of medicine is learning the names of tens of thousands of nerves, muscles, bones etc. Medical schools don’t try to teach diagnosis and treatment without a base of knowledge, and neither should anyone else approach a subject backwards. New math is about 50 years old in our education system.
Bravo! Bravo!! Bravo!!!
How did it ever merit society to have generations of people who cannot maintain a household budget?
I know… Liberal/NDP voters…
(sigh)
I wouldn’t get your hopes up too much over this. The left has infiltrated education to such a degree that this will be at best a temporary victory.
I predict that within the next 20 years a very large number of parents are going to use technology and their own time to teach their kids – to hell with school. They might keep their kids in school for social reasons, but beyond that the real education will largely happen outside of school.
This is already taking place with some families, the difference going forward is that it will snowball.
The public education system cannot be fixed, it is far too broken at this point, and the special interests far too entrenched.
All of this used to worry me very much until I realized that the left is just shooting themselves in the foot. If they want to destroy education let them. It will just make it easier for my own kids to get ahead.
Although some people would beg to differ, the old argument about school being a good place to learn social skills has lost much of its validity. I have worked with many home schooled children who displayed exceptional interactive skills, and I have seen many promising young people pick up extremely detrimental behaviors, worldviews, and attitudes from peers and teachers in public schools. If I had to do it over again, I would definitely home school my own kids. Not just for academic reason – the once supposed strengths of public schooling – relating to people, having positive friends, learning how to approach new situations – are now strengths of the home school community.
I was at a party when I met an old friend that I went to school with back in the late 60’s. I was shocked to learn that he had taught math for the better part of his life. He was about the worst student I had ever encountered.
”Teaching math is easy” he said. ”You ask the kid, ‘Johnny, what`s five plus five?’ So the kid answers ‘eight,’ he`s got it 80% right. So you give him an 80.”
Far out?? not really.
From the National Post link: “‘Every jurisdiction under WNCP has shown steadily decreasing assessment outcomes since the introduction of the WNCP curriculum,’ said Mr. Craigen.”
So the education system can make “evidence-based” policies based on this clear evidence, and reject the “ideology” of the new math, right? More precisely, if it were to follow what the “progressives” claim are their methods?
If schools had to compete with each other on an equal footing, the use of children as guinea pigs through dubious instructional packages like “new math” would likely come to a quick end, as the schools which chose the most successful methods would get all the students. Bring on the vouchers!
What will it take for Ontario to catch up to the rest of the country when it comes to getting back to the basics of education? Could it be that the left views any changes to improve the system that’s for the good of student achievement as some sort of a right-wing conspiracy? Seems to me that unless the impetus for change and improvement comes from within the system itself the entrenched teaching faculties and union shops will continue to bury their collective heads in the sand.
This is the best conservative blog IMO. Terrific that it’s still going strong and isn’t whiney or preachy like so many other blogs.
But the whole point of new math is to prevent children from
clinging to any and all “rightist fixed concepts” before the
Marxists are certain their own indoctrination efforts have been
successful. Let them keep their brainwashing priorities straight
and stop the patriarchal harassment .
and our education systems seem to be only too glad to help move the leftist view of, well, just about anything.
Perhaps someone should clue them in to the fact that doing what’s right and effective for students transcends being right, left, centrist, or anything else for that matter.
Bingo.
I think the socialisation reason for educating children in a classroom setting is bunk. If a child is naturally introverted, you are putting him in a position where he must react because the teacher makes him, not because he is moved to do so. I, too, have met well-adjusted home-schooled kids. Consider what people think is socialisation now- cell phones, Facebook pages, rude, ill-bred kids mixing with polite ones. I am not convinced of the popular reasoning.
I don’t disagree. My only point is that if one home schools, which I think is a very good idea and power to those who do it, how do you ensure your kids have friends and socialize?
Nearly every child I have met that has been home schooled has been polite, mature, and far better behaved than most youngsters. I am always struck by this.
I just wish there was some way to break free from the public school system, while still having an environment where kids (of like-minded parents) can socialize on a daily basis together.
There is private school, but it’s too damned expensive, and in our case too far from our home.
Yes, it’s true those educated in the 40 years ago have better math and English skills, but then again they/we turned out to be greedy, angry, white, racists. Well, we can’t have that, we must retrain, I mean save, the children. (sarc off)
Kids socialise with others around them and often have sports teams, ect. I’ve seen “schooled” kids act so rudely and anti-socially that it really does lend credibility to the idea that schools ruin kids.
But one can also blame the parents.
BC said, “how do you ensure your (home-schooled) kids have friends and socialize?”
To accept this premise is to buy-in to the Public School System’s propaganda that children need public school to socialize. Kids need the public schools to socialize like alligators need icefloes to propagate. To stop children from socializing, you must lock them in a closet.
For too long has the Public School industry dominated society’s basic assumptions about children and learning. Judge these people on their record, not on their pronouncements.
Ditto with home-schooled children.
In my home area, which is a small (40,000) city, there is an active home school association. They usually get together once a week for sports or to explore an area one or more parents has expertise in. They have done professional pottery, changed out a car engine, and welded modern art, as well as putting shingles on a roof, gone skating, etc. Also, most kids nowadays do not get together for informal play after school, anyway – sports teams and organized activities such as gymnastics are available to all, and home schooled kids often excel in those, due to better focus and self-discipline. Public schools are a product only of the last century; humanity did fine without them for a long time, and we can do without them now. Read some of the stories written by frontier kids of the 19th century. They were usually educated by their parents or a neighbor, and they were far better educated than most high school grads are now. I personally think the time is ripe for home school cells, where a few families get together and share the teaching load, as well as use each others skills to expose their kids to things outside their own area of knowledge.
First time, NE Yankee, Osumashi, others, isn’t there a huge business opportunity lurking here?
If I take my own situation, got three fine children, would do anything to get them out of the public school but (1) private far too expensive and in my case too far to take them (2) simply not enough time to properly home school.
Couldn’t some mix of technology and home school cells work in some way? As an alternative, I have thought about some sort of on-line testing system where you as a parent could at least get some idea of where your kids stands in basic skills (math, science, reading, writing, etc.) relative to the rest of the world.
The public school system is largely beyond repair in my view, and there is no point in holding out hope for it. For example in my daughter’s high-school English class the teacher told them to pick their own books to read, and write essays on these books. Any book they want, it can a book about teenage vampires for all the teacher cares. How the hell can this be called education? It is wrong in so many ways.
I get myself in a bad mood just writing about this topic!
I think it’s important to push the ideas further in order to cause a complete collapse of the system. For example, most sports require drills to become proficient in various aspects of a game. Instead, all team sports should be taught in such a manner that the kids could discover the rules themselves and any repetitive drills should be strongly discouraged. Also, kids should be taught the theory of physical exercise and spend time on this rather than engaging in repetitive and mind numbing activities.
While the effects won’t be immediate, when there is a marked drop in Canadian kids who can play hockey, suddenly the population might take notice. Also, the visual effect of grossly obese hockey players waddling around the arena on their ankles having never learned to stand up on skates shooting a puck wide of an open net would be an indictment of modern educational methods that it would never recover from.
I learned mathematics using an engineering approach from my father (an engineer) which was basically the simplest way to do something. No theory, just here’s the best way we’ve found to do this. When I took a circuit theory course, suddenly all of the complicated differential equations of the circuit were replaced with nice algebraic equations by performing a Laplace transform. Works very well unless one gets into chaotic realms; back in the days when I learned that stuff we didn’t know about chaos theory yet and Catastrophe theory was the closest analog. We were just told that here are the areas where the simplification works and here’s where it doesn’t work.
The figuring out things from first principles method is an absolutely asinine way of teaching kids. There’s a reason we have books and that’s to record how we’ve solved particular problems. Some of the most boring mathematics books that I’ve read were very involved treatises with endless theorems and proofs showing basically that 1+1 = 2. When one goes back to first principles is when a heuristic method one uses runs into conflict with reality — that’s when one carefully looks at the theoretical underpinnings of what one is doing and why they no longer work in the current situation.
Making change is a process that hasn’t changed in centuries and one would expect people to intuitively know that $10.47 – $5.47 = $5. I can’t believe the number of young sales clerks who I totally mystify when I hand them $10.47 for a $5.47 purchase and it’s not until they punch the numbers into the cash register that they might get a slight hint of what I’ve done.
“The figuring out things from first principles method is an absolutely asinine way of teaching kids.”.
YES!
How did children learn before Prussian-style schools? From their parents. Online teaching/classes or some alternative to the badly managed public schools are inevitable. One way to whip teachers into shape is to remove teachers’ unions from the equation. When there is no union to hide behind, the laziness one sees from some teachers will disappear.
Just my quick thoughts.
Today’s Old Math was once yesterday’s New Math, as explained by the great Tom Lehrer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
Hell! Why ruin things?
Just when Manitoba was about to become the world leader in producing little Liberals, along these thugs come and decide to teach them basic math!
I must say, and will say loudly, that memorisation is a good thing. In the first place, if someone memorises something, they know that thing. The second is that memory + knowledge of principles, in science and mathematics, is like a “plywood” that is stronger than the component parts. Canadian children have been turned over to charlatans for a generation, maybe even two generations. It is time to reclaim them.
I am not unfamiliar with Peano’s axioms and other set-theoretic approaches to arithmetic, but I (and no doubt Peano, Bertrand Russell, and even the Bourbaki) think these are useless in grade and even high school. The point is to justify the algorithms and add and multiply tables, and that does not need to be done by everyone.
A typical problem we had to do for our O levels was: given 201 pounds, 19 shillings, and 11pence ha’penny, and interest at 3.6% is due, find the interest in pounds shillings and pence. We had to do a lot of these. If you would like to give it a try, remember that there were 20 shillings to the pound, and 12 pence to the shilling. The method is to convert to pounds and decimal fractions thereof, compute the interest, and then convert the interest back to pounds shillings and pence. Remember, no calculator!
You know you’re in trouble when you pay for a purchase and the clerk can’t make change without benefit of a cash register or calculator. At least you SHOULD know…
I’ve had to teach my kids arithmetic the old fashioned way. They know their multiplication tables, multiplication, long division, fractions, decimals etc. They can usually calculate change and add up the scrabble score in their heads. It’s annoying to have to this AND pay school taxes, but what are you going to do? At least they get a in math.
I heart my calculator:-))))
The idea behind the new math was to base grade school mathematics on the theoretical foundations of mathematical systems – that is, set theory.
What a bizarre idea. In university, even honours students in mathematics study the foundations of mathematics quite sparingly — I know, I was one. Perhaps a few weeks on cardinality and the definition of real numbers, that sort of thing. Physics and engineering students might not study such things at all.
The new math, in other words, seemed to be an attempt to turn grade schoolers into pure mathematicians. I don’t know why they thought that would be a good idea.
There is only one kind of math and I’ve had it to the nth degree. The stupidity was teaching kids to run before they could walk. Just like social studies teaches kids to reason without a knowledge base, new math introduces theoretical concepts before kids can do arithmetic. Both totally fail.
Rote learning produces results. The initial study of medicine is learning the names of tens of thousands of nerves, muscles, bones etc. Medical schools don’t try to teach diagnosis and treatment without a base of knowledge, and neither should anyone else approach a subject backwards. New math is about 50 years old in our education system.
Bravo! Bravo!! Bravo!!!
How did it ever merit society to have generations of people who cannot maintain a household budget?
I know… Liberal/NDP voters…
(sigh)
I wouldn’t get your hopes up too much over this. The left has infiltrated education to such a degree that this will be at best a temporary victory.
I predict that within the next 20 years a very large number of parents are going to use technology and their own time to teach their kids – to hell with school. They might keep their kids in school for social reasons, but beyond that the real education will largely happen outside of school.
This is already taking place with some families, the difference going forward is that it will snowball.
The public education system cannot be fixed, it is far too broken at this point, and the special interests far too entrenched.
All of this used to worry me very much until I realized that the left is just shooting themselves in the foot. If they want to destroy education let them. It will just make it easier for my own kids to get ahead.
Although some people would beg to differ, the old argument about school being a good place to learn social skills has lost much of its validity. I have worked with many home schooled children who displayed exceptional interactive skills, and I have seen many promising young people pick up extremely detrimental behaviors, worldviews, and attitudes from peers and teachers in public schools. If I had to do it over again, I would definitely home school my own kids. Not just for academic reason – the once supposed strengths of public schooling – relating to people, having positive friends, learning how to approach new situations – are now strengths of the home school community.
I was at a party when I met an old friend that I went to school with back in the late 60’s. I was shocked to learn that he had taught math for the better part of his life. He was about the worst student I had ever encountered.
”Teaching math is easy” he said. ”You ask the kid, ‘Johnny, what`s five plus five?’ So the kid answers ‘eight,’ he`s got it 80% right. So you give him an 80.”
Far out?? not really.
From the National Post link: “‘Every jurisdiction under WNCP has shown steadily decreasing assessment outcomes since the introduction of the WNCP curriculum,’ said Mr. Craigen.”
So the education system can make “evidence-based” policies based on this clear evidence, and reject the “ideology” of the new math, right? More precisely, if it were to follow what the “progressives” claim are their methods?
If schools had to compete with each other on an equal footing, the use of children as guinea pigs through dubious instructional packages like “new math” would likely come to a quick end, as the schools which chose the most successful methods would get all the students. Bring on the vouchers!
What will it take for Ontario to catch up to the rest of the country when it comes to getting back to the basics of education? Could it be that the left views any changes to improve the system that’s for the good of student achievement as some sort of a right-wing conspiracy? Seems to me that unless the impetus for change and improvement comes from within the system itself the entrenched teaching faculties and union shops will continue to bury their collective heads in the sand.
This is the best conservative blog IMO. Terrific that it’s still going strong and isn’t whiney or preachy like so many other blogs.
But the whole point of new math is to prevent children from
clinging to any and all “rightist fixed concepts” before the
Marxists are certain their own indoctrination efforts have been
successful. Let them keep their brainwashing priorities straight
and stop the patriarchal harassment .
and our education systems seem to be only too glad to help move the leftist view of, well, just about anything.
Perhaps someone should clue them in to the fact that doing what’s right and effective for students transcends being right, left, centrist, or anything else for that matter.
Bingo.
I think the socialisation reason for educating children in a classroom setting is bunk. If a child is naturally introverted, you are putting him in a position where he must react because the teacher makes him, not because he is moved to do so. I, too, have met well-adjusted home-schooled kids. Consider what people think is socialisation now- cell phones, Facebook pages, rude, ill-bred kids mixing with polite ones. I am not convinced of the popular reasoning.
I don’t disagree. My only point is that if one home schools, which I think is a very good idea and power to those who do it, how do you ensure your kids have friends and socialize?
Nearly every child I have met that has been home schooled has been polite, mature, and far better behaved than most youngsters. I am always struck by this.
I just wish there was some way to break free from the public school system, while still having an environment where kids (of like-minded parents) can socialize on a daily basis together.
There is private school, but it’s too damned expensive, and in our case too far from our home.
Yes, it’s true those educated in the 40 years ago have better math and English skills, but then again they/we turned out to be greedy, angry, white, racists. Well, we can’t have that, we must retrain, I mean save, the children. (sarc off)
Kids socialise with others around them and often have sports teams, ect. I’ve seen “schooled” kids act so rudely and anti-socially that it really does lend credibility to the idea that schools ruin kids.
But one can also blame the parents.
BC said, “how do you ensure your (home-schooled) kids have friends and socialize?”
To accept this premise is to buy-in to the Public School System’s propaganda that children need public school to socialize. Kids need the public schools to socialize like alligators need icefloes to propagate. To stop children from socializing, you must lock them in a closet.
For too long has the Public School industry dominated society’s basic assumptions about children and learning. Judge these people on their record, not on their pronouncements.
Ditto with home-schooled children.
In my home area, which is a small (40,000) city, there is an active home school association. They usually get together once a week for sports or to explore an area one or more parents has expertise in. They have done professional pottery, changed out a car engine, and welded modern art, as well as putting shingles on a roof, gone skating, etc. Also, most kids nowadays do not get together for informal play after school, anyway – sports teams and organized activities such as gymnastics are available to all, and home schooled kids often excel in those, due to better focus and self-discipline. Public schools are a product only of the last century; humanity did fine without them for a long time, and we can do without them now. Read some of the stories written by frontier kids of the 19th century. They were usually educated by their parents or a neighbor, and they were far better educated than most high school grads are now. I personally think the time is ripe for home school cells, where a few families get together and share the teaching load, as well as use each others skills to expose their kids to things outside their own area of knowledge.
First time, NE Yankee, Osumashi, others, isn’t there a huge business opportunity lurking here?
If I take my own situation, got three fine children, would do anything to get them out of the public school but (1) private far too expensive and in my case too far to take them (2) simply not enough time to properly home school.
Couldn’t some mix of technology and home school cells work in some way? As an alternative, I have thought about some sort of on-line testing system where you as a parent could at least get some idea of where your kids stands in basic skills (math, science, reading, writing, etc.) relative to the rest of the world.
The public school system is largely beyond repair in my view, and there is no point in holding out hope for it. For example in my daughter’s high-school English class the teacher told them to pick their own books to read, and write essays on these books. Any book they want, it can a book about teenage vampires for all the teacher cares. How the hell can this be called education? It is wrong in so many ways.
I get myself in a bad mood just writing about this topic!
I think it’s important to push the ideas further in order to cause a complete collapse of the system. For example, most sports require drills to become proficient in various aspects of a game. Instead, all team sports should be taught in such a manner that the kids could discover the rules themselves and any repetitive drills should be strongly discouraged. Also, kids should be taught the theory of physical exercise and spend time on this rather than engaging in repetitive and mind numbing activities.
While the effects won’t be immediate, when there is a marked drop in Canadian kids who can play hockey, suddenly the population might take notice. Also, the visual effect of grossly obese hockey players waddling around the arena on their ankles having never learned to stand up on skates shooting a puck wide of an open net would be an indictment of modern educational methods that it would never recover from.
I learned mathematics using an engineering approach from my father (an engineer) which was basically the simplest way to do something. No theory, just here’s the best way we’ve found to do this. When I took a circuit theory course, suddenly all of the complicated differential equations of the circuit were replaced with nice algebraic equations by performing a Laplace transform. Works very well unless one gets into chaotic realms; back in the days when I learned that stuff we didn’t know about chaos theory yet and Catastrophe theory was the closest analog. We were just told that here are the areas where the simplification works and here’s where it doesn’t work.
The figuring out things from first principles method is an absolutely asinine way of teaching kids. There’s a reason we have books and that’s to record how we’ve solved particular problems. Some of the most boring mathematics books that I’ve read were very involved treatises with endless theorems and proofs showing basically that 1+1 = 2. When one goes back to first principles is when a heuristic method one uses runs into conflict with reality — that’s when one carefully looks at the theoretical underpinnings of what one is doing and why they no longer work in the current situation.
Making change is a process that hasn’t changed in centuries and one would expect people to intuitively know that $10.47 – $5.47 = $5. I can’t believe the number of young sales clerks who I totally mystify when I hand them $10.47 for a $5.47 purchase and it’s not until they punch the numbers into the cash register that they might get a slight hint of what I’ve done.
“The figuring out things from first principles method is an absolutely asinine way of teaching kids.”.
YES!
How did children learn before Prussian-style schools? From their parents. Online teaching/classes or some alternative to the badly managed public schools are inevitable. One way to whip teachers into shape is to remove teachers’ unions from the equation. When there is no union to hide behind, the laziness one sees from some teachers will disappear.
Just my quick thoughts.