I have heard and enjoy the Tom Lehrer song of the same name, but am a bit fuzzy on exactly what the whole “new math” business was about.
If there are some Dopers out there who could give me some info, I’d be most thankful.
Well, this link to the answer isn’t exactly the Master speaking, but it’s close enough.
Somehow, I managed to avoid new math in elementary school.
What exactly was the “new math”?
By SDStaff Ian.
Well, I never followed this very closely since it came long after I was out of school and my kids never had any problems, but essentially the idea was that since mathematics could be founded on set theory, then set theory should be taught from the beginning, rather than arithmetic. It was foisted off on the educational establishment by some very silly mathematicians who really didn’t think it through. I have no idea whether the basic idea–that kids can learn things in logical foundational order–is sound, but without starting with a generation of teachers who were very conversant with set theory and so on, it was utterly hopeless and resulted in a generation of kids who knew neither set theory nor arithmetic.
A couple of anecdotes involving my own kids will illustrate the problem. My daughter’s fifth grade class was asked how many subsets a set of three elements had. “Express your answer as a power of 2.” Ok, this is pretty easy and my daughter raised her hand and answered 2^3. “Wrong”, said the teacher, “It is 256.” I assume she misunderstood the question as asking the answer to be exponentiated (2^8 = 256). Arguably, her problem wasn’t with mathematics, but with understanding simple English, but the outcome was the whole class laughed that mighty Becky was wrong for once. The other story involved my son who had spent third grade in a school in Switzerland where they also did some new math. Back home, his fourth grade teacher had a series of problems of converting base 10 numbers to base 6. Let us say the numbers were 5, 12, 23, 34, 61 (I am sure of the last). All the numbers but the last were < 36 and the teacher had discovered an algorithm that did work for such numbers. Divide by 6 and the express your answer as quotient,remainder. Unfortunately, she came up with the answer that 61 in base 10 is 101 in base 6. My son said, “No, it is 141.” The teacher asked him how he knew and he said that he learned this the previous year in Switzerland. Her answer was classic: “Maybe that’s how they do it in Switzerland, but this is how we do it here.”!!
As I said, I have no idea if the basic idea was sound, but it was implemented in such a half-ass way that there was no chance. On average, the elementary teacher’s worse subject was math. And even math specialists, for schools that had them, had very rarely if ever, studied any advanced math.
In the bad old days, school teaching was one of the few outlets open to a bright woman. Now there are many more outlets, such as being CEO of HP and the ones that go into school teaching are, by and large, the dregs. Not all, certainly, but on average. I am sure I will get dumped on for saying this, but it is still true. And given the pay that we are willing to pay school teachers, it is likely to remain so. Neither money nor respect accrues to school teaching and it shows.
There was a book published recently that contrasted Chinese school teachers with Americans and the Chinese teachers had a much better understanding of basic arithmetic. I conjecture that this is a highly respected occupation in China.
Now I duck.