Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

I had the, IMHO, good fortune to attend US public elementary school 1966-1972, at the height of the New Math pedagogy, so had little difficulty recognizing in any grade that 5-3 = -3 +5 = 5 + (-3) = 2 etc, or even -5 +2 = -3.

New Math emphasized geometric and set theoretical approaches over rote arithmetic, and the teaching of presumably more advanced abstract ideas before practical arithmetic.

Although my memory of the 1st grade is distant, I recall that our classroom had a large paper number line attached to the top edge of its chalkboard, and that addition and subtraction was taught as addition and subtraction of 1-dimensional vectors, a very clear and intuitive approach.

How well a pedagogic approach works depends not only on the expert-dictated approach, but on the comprehension and acceptance of it by each teacher. I had the additional good fortune to have a 1st grade teacher who was a recent college graduate, and was unhampered by habits from previous pedagogies and enthusiastic about and capable of using the new teaching methods.

In later grades, my classmates and I encountered more senior teachers who rejected New Math, and to some extent tried to “reeducate” us away from it. The reaction of me and many of my classmates was the opposite of what these teacher intended, however, as we quickly discovered that, in many ways, we already knew more math – and knew it more deeply – than our teachers, leapt to the conclusion that we were all much smarter than they, and made a game of attempting to trip them up and humiliate them in from of the class, our New Math mindsets stronger than ever.

While evidenced based pedagogy strongly supports approaches like the 1960s' New Math, many parents and other students’ family members, however, reject it in favor of “the good old-fashioned three Rs”. While extreme versions of either approaches are non-optimal, and best approaches need to be somewhat tailored to individual students and teachers, the optimal approach is IMHO much closer to the New Math end of the continuum than the 3 Rs.