I had a smattering of the “set theory” stuff (and “arrays”, anyone else have “arrays”?) and had to do some arithmetic in base 8. Mostly what I remember is that one year, all of a sudden we had to be able to identify “properties” (rules) from examples:
3 + 7 = 7 + 3
Your answer: That there is the Commutative Property of Addition.
3 x (7 x 5) = (3 x 7) x 5
Your answer: That would be the Associate Property of Multiplication
3 x (4 + 6) = (3 x 4) + (3 x 6)
Your answer: And that one is the Distributive Property of Multiplication over Addition
Anyone who’d had arithmetic in 1st through 3rd grades would’ve known the “properties” intuitively but now we had to know the freaking names for them.
:rolleyes:
Essentially we got addition in 1st grade, subtraction multiplication and division in 2nd grade, and then they drilled us on it nonstop for four more years. Decimals, Fractions. Multiplication of five-digit and nine-digit numbers. Long division (show your work!). Any way you cut it, it was still all addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, carry the one, add five, take one from the hundreds column, carry down the seven. Boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring.
Almost no geometry except in nursery school (This is a triangle! A triangle has three sides!), and no algebra. Just add subtract multiply and divide. New unit today, oh lookie, we’re doing the metric system, we’re going to convert feet to meters and cups to milliliters, new ways for you to do nasty multidecimalplace multiplication and division! Next unit: equations that mix decimals with fractions, getting the Least Common Denominator (again, but always ten-based this time).
I don’t know how much of that was new math and how much was old math, but I hated nearly every minute of it for six years. Only thing that was at all fun was the word problems (occasional units interspersed). All else was drudgery and annoyance.
I liked New Math (although we’ll never know how things might have been different for me with Old Math).
Second grade, must have been about 1962-63, and the teacher picked me to demo the wooden puzzle-like board that provided a tangible experience of the addends and augends that make 10 for a photographer from Time magazine covering a story on the New Math. Two weeks later, I’m famous! At least the back of my head was famous.
I always found math to be fun and interesting. Enough so that I spent 15 years as a civil engineer (I’ve since moved on to other things, but I still enjoy math and am considering another mid-life career change to teach high school math). So New Math wasn’t a disaster, at least not universally.
I started elementary school (first grade) in 1989. From what I can see by reading the description, we had a lot of New Math stuff in our curriculum. I remember learning base 2, base 5, base 8, base 12, and base 16. I also remember Venn diagrams, and the Commutative, Associative & Distributive properties (oh, how I hated those!). To be fair, most of the New Math stuff was taught in the “fast” math class, or in the pull-out math class that I took.
I don’t really think it scarred me, at least not much. I mean, I’m not a math major, but I went through AP Calc in 11th grade (with AP Stats my senior year) without too much difficulty. The only thing I ever had a problem with was trig (which we started in elementary school), and that was more a visualization problem than anything else.
Count me in, too. I was born in '64, so I was in elementary school in the early 70s, and I remember learning New Math. My parents were just as confused as I was!
In addition, we also learned the Metric System, because, as we were told, the US was the ‘only’ country in the world not using metric, and would be switching over eventually - we would be completely metric by the year 2000.
I never learned feet and inches and yards, and pints and quarts and gallons. It was all metric measurements.
I never found new math a problem; I kind of liked learning things like base 7 and the basics behind the operations.
Old math left me unable to add numbers together in my head (and I only got by by developing my own method of counting), so I find it much worse.
I also think that modern math teaching (at least, in New York State High Schools) is an idiotic abomination. You learn a little algebra, a little geometry, a little trig. Then, the next year, you go back to algebra – and have to relearn what you had learned almost a year previously.
I forgot to mention - Venn Diagrams were mentioned in another thread, and I had to ask what they were. Another poster linked to them, and while I remember doing them, we never called them that. The name ‘Venn Diagrams’ means nothing to me. I can’t for the life of me remember what name we used. It’s actually been nagging at me for a few days.
I was in grade school in the early-mid sixties, which seemed to be the height of the New Math craze. No more rules; concepts are everything! Apparently, everyone was eventually going to be learning calculus and set theory. Among other things, my classmates and I were taught various number systems (I still remember Hebrew, Egyptian, and binary), 4 different ways to do long division (I still suck at it), and Venn diagrams out the wazoo.
I don’t know if it was just an experiment or not, but when I got to the seventh grade (within the same school system), it was back to basic math. Thank goodness.
I took three semesters of calculus in college, and I’m pretty sure my training in New Math was wasted.
I’m in my fourth math-for-elementary-teachers course. The best stuff I’ve been learning is that manipulatives are becoming very popular: when teaching addition, you can give kids objects to play with and have the figure out the answer to the problem first, without much teacher input. After they’ve had a chance to try to solve it, the class discusses different solutions that different students have come up with, how they worked, and whether it’s a sound method for solving the problem. The goal is for kids to understand that you can solve a problem in a lot of different ways, since math is logical.
For example, you might ask kids to solve the problem 63-47. You can give them blocks. The kids might come up with the following solutions:
Make a pile of 47 blocks. Add enough blocks to it to make a pile of 63 blocks. Count how many you added.
Make a pile of 63 blocks. Remove enough blocks from it to make a pile of 47 blocks. Count how many you removed.
Designate some blocks as tens and others as ones. Use methods 1 or 2 above.
Ignore the blocks. Subtract three from 63, and then subtract 40 from 60, and then subtract 4 from 20; altogether, you’ve subtracted 47 from 63.
Add 3 to 47, then 10 to 50, then 3 to 60. Altogether you’ve found difference of 16 between 47 and 63.
Line up the numbers and perform the traditional algorithm, complete with regrouping (borrowing to you fogeys).
Add 3 to 47 and 3 to 63, and then perform the problem 66-50.
All these methods work just fine, and all of them arrive at the same answer. The more methods a kid knows for solving a common type of problem, the more flexible and powerful their math skills become. Ideally, a person faced with a math problem can use any of several strategies for solving it, depending on the type of problem.
That’s the theory. I’ve had mixed success in using it with kids; but then, I’ve only worked sporadically with kids on their math, and I’ve not been able to design my own lessons for them or work with them over long periods.
Bases. I hated bases with a passion. Why I even have to know how to work in base 8? It wasn’t like I was going to ever use it again, and I never did. One of the main things I remember, though, is the funky textbooks with the lurid little cartoons, and those pimpin’ little skinny 70’s people with huge granny-glasses and lime-green weskits lurking in Venn diagrams: there was always one little black dude with stack heels and a giant 'fro. Groovy.
Perhaps the book I got was an exceptionally good one, or perhaps I pick up concepts in such a way that “new math” slid in perfectly, but it worked for me. Really, really well, in fact.
There was a recent thread in GD about whether concepts were essential or not. I would say “yes,” and that’s what that style of mathematical instruction did, it taught concepts. And when you used those concepts to build upon traditional mathematics, they worked well together to enhance my understanding of the material.
I have run across otherwise very intelligent adults who either don’t know or can’t use the associative property when adding (and are amazed when I do it on paper not even in my head). They’ve memorized 3+7 = 10 and 7+3 = 10, but those are two entirely unconnected facts in their heads; commutativity is entirely foreign (not just the word, but the idea behind the word).
The stuff that new math taught was useful in arithmetic and essential when learning more advanced mathematics.
I had new math in 8th grade, in between standard arithmetic in 7th and standard algebra in 9th. I found the subject matter interesting and pretty easy, and it served me well later on. So, no, I wasn’t a victim, I was a beneficiary.
Except that the teacher was the most arrogant prick I’ve ever had to endure, bar none. How the man was allowed around children, I’ll never know.
I am not entirely too sure, still, what New Math is and isn’t, but I am pretty sure it is coming back. My mother is a third grade teacher, and for a couple of years now they have been moving to more and more abstract concepts. This year, they decided to forgoe teaching kids how to count with money. It’s not that important, they say. Instead, my mother has to teach them permutations and combinations, something I’d never expect a 3rd grader to know.
I learned old math in the 80s, and I wish I had learned the new math.
I can’t do math to save my life- even adding a long column of numbers is a risk for me. And part of that is the whole “voodoo” factor. To me math means you take some numbers, you apply some voodoo to it, and you get some other numbers. I don’t know how to actually use that voodoo or figure out which voodoo to use, only that I have to use this formula or that formula for this set of math problems or I will get a bad grade.
It just doesn’t work for me. It’s like space. I can’t give directions, but I can find my way anywhere. Different learning styles is all.
Holy Crap! Until I read this thread I thought it was just me. I was a victim of all of the wonderful new techniques in the 60’s including acceleration. I was 12 when I started high school and do not feel intellectually threatened by anything but math. I developed my own bizarre way of coming up with the answers to addition,subtraction,multiplication,and division but I couldn’t “show” my work. Of course I’ve heard of “the new math” but never really knew what it meant and didn’t care because it was “math” Wow. maybe I can learn that stuff.
I had 1st through 4th grade of new math. I liked it a lot better than what I had in 5th and 6th grade, which was seemingly endless multiplication and long division, with occasional massive addition and some subtraction. If the new math did me any harm, it was that I felt that, since I understood the concepts of multiplication and division, doing a bunch of long-ass problems by hand was a monumental waste of time. I understand it, the calculator can do it, so what was the point, exactly???
What I hope they are teaching today’s kids is spreadsheets.
Hmmm… born in '61, my elementary school (public) was mostly traditional style with a hint of new math such as manipulables; middle/Jr. High (small town private) got me to Venn diagrams and sets and the such for 3 years of wandering around wondering where the heck was this going; High School (big city private) was more inclined to classic algebra, geometry, trig, calc – the geometry teacher (grade 10) was into “concepts” but we thought he was high; the advanced trig/calc guy was a crazy Chilean whom we suspected was getting his PhD in order to go back home to develop WMDs, but he was good at getting the point across.
The switch between elementary/middle was specially traumatic since the schoools used wholly different curricula and I was deeply confused. I eventually had to reteach myself Long Division, had to spend a year faking it.
Interestingly the commutative/distributive/associative properties were taught in grade school and it did not faze me much. Then again they were wise enough not to make a big deal of reciting the Holy Words as long as we got the right answer.
What I do realize looking back at that time is that for the longest time, I was so **not ** understanding the processes behind the maths from grade 6 up. Oh, I was getting straight A’s (and 650 in the mathematical SAT, 1978 vintage), but in reality most of my classwork/homework I attacked through a “brute force” approach (attempt every single concept covered so far, starting with the one from the last lesson, see which one does come up with (a)an answer that (b)looks sane; if nothing seems to work, break problem into component parts and repeat the process; as you can imagine this led down to a lot of eventual 0=0 or x=x blind alleys), so it took a lot out of me, when it could have been a lot easier and less intimidating had I been able to, like, “get” what was it I was expected to do.
You and me both! “New Math” was taught in my first primary school, and I loved all the pretty blocks, diagrams, etc. I was good at it.
Then we moved. At my new school – your basic resistant-to-Vatican II neighborhood parochial school – Old Math was still very much in place. I had no freaking idea what the heck they were teaching. Decimals? Word problems? Fractions? WTF?!? I went from As to Cs with a couple of Ds thrown in. I stayed after school for help. It still didn’t make sense to me.
Then I transferred to a public junior high. They did New Math through the 8th grade. I was golden. Then Algebra I. I ended up flunking the class. I took a summer school sesson, flunked that again, then finally passed my sophomore year with a D.
I never took another math class again. I’m perfectly satisfied knowing how to balance a checkbook and do simple computations. Anything else, I’m dead meat.