Were YOU A Victim of "New Math"?

[Hostile_Dialect]

Also: My physics teacher last semester was incredibly anal about units, never wrote them down while doing the problem, and always got the right end units–which he would then check mentally in quick fashion. I got an A in that class.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@sunacres

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.

There was a Time Life book Mathematics from around that time, and there was a photo sequence of primary-age schoolchildren being taught new math. I’ll have to see if I can scare up a copy of that at UCLA and see if you’re in it!

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).

You sound like you’d be good at teaching, maybe even at ‘rescuing’ students who’ve already given up on math.

[Napier]

I did “new math” in the 60s and this might have been what propelled me into a career as a physicist in industry. I remember being amazed at how cleverly it all fit together and how all these things worked. It seemed like somebody had figured out a carpet of logic that went on and on, through all the kinds of things one might ever have to figure out.

If you want to stop at being able to balance your checkbook, this might not be the ride for you. But for me it certainly helped ignite something. I have been doing computational fluid dynamics today and absolutely love my work.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Magiver

I’m not so arrogant as to insist there is only 1 method of teaching math but I can say 2 things with a degree of certainty:

• my depression-era parents (and classmates) could all do math with a high degree of competency.
• teaching multiple methods of the same concept reduces the amount of time spent on a single method which reduces the potential for mastering a single task.

It’s cool if your family could, but I’ve seen stats suggesting that 90% of children dropped out of high school in the 1920s and 1930s; by 1959, the dropout rate still sucked:

the dropout rate in 1959 was almost 50% of all those who had entered the first grade, and 21% of those who had reached the tenth grade!

The good old days really weren’t all that good.

As for the benefits of teaching a single method, I strenuously disagree with you. Students need a method that they can understand, and different methods make sense to different students. Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory is, as near as I can tell, pretty well accepted at this point; I’ve not talked to a teacher in a long time who disagrees with the idea of teaching through multiple avenues.

While I’m on a soapbox, there is no place for math questions that involve estimation UNTIL the task is mastered. Estimation is useful as a check to see that you’re in the ballpark. I was appalled that some of my nephew’s homework and tests were entirely estimated.

Again, I disagree. Some students have problems like dyscalculia (essentially dyslexia for numerals); estimation taught before mastery allows them to see if they’re in the ballpark. But good estimation is a specific skill that needs teaching; naturally you’ll have some homework assignments that revolve entirely around this skill.

In the real world, estimation is pretty useful. If I’m multiplying a soup by 2/3, I don’t need to get everything exact: I just need to get everything fairly close. If I’m increasing inventory for a small store to meet sales projected based on last month’s sales, I don’t need an exact guess: an estimate is good enough.

Daniel

[Ponder_Stibbons]

I’m not going to bother to even try to judge New Math -vs- whatever. I can only tell you my own experience.

In the early 1970’s I went to elementary school in Norman, Oklahoma. For those of you not acquainted with the area, that’s where the University of Oklahoma is. Not too surprisingly (at least looking back at it now), the school system there was full of OU grads just dying to try out the latest educational methodology. I didn’t do well at all. In fact, they were convinced I had a mental handicapped and put me in “Special” classes, where I did even worse.

After a couple of years of that my parents moved to the small town of Guthrie, Oklahoma. None of that fancy “new math” or whatever the latest fad was there. It was just old fashioned no-frills education. I thrived. By the time I graduated from high school I was regularly getting A’s, taking advanced classes, etc. Went straight to college without a second thought.

So I guess I was almost a victim of New Math, or whatever “pop” education methodology it was. Lucky for me my parents moved.

[bordelond]

@Otto

I remember learning to work with different bases and doing a lot of Venn diagrams. If that’s New Math, then I must’ve come in on the tail end of it in the early to mid 70s. Didn’t seem to do me much harm. I had no problems with algebra or geometry.

*That * was the New Math that supposedly messed everyone up? :dubious:

Come now – the set theory I remember being taught was ridiculously easy. Non-decimal bases could be potentially daunting … if you let it.

But they were discrete lessons from computation or algebra – how could exposure to set theory and non-decimal bases get in the way of learning traditional math?