What exactly was the "new math"?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Your answer to, "What exactly was the “new math?” was spot on. I was a product of the 1960s educational system, and my daughter was in grade school in the 1990s.

I remember that in the fourth grade, mid-term, the teacher took our math books and announced that we would be using different math books, and learning the “new math.” This was in 1967.

My education in mathematics pretty much stopped there for many years. I simply could not understand the bizarre concepts that were being taught.

The summer before I started college, I decided that I must become competent in math. With the help of math books written in the forties and fifties, I learned math from simple arithmetic to algebra and trigonometry in three months! Math books written in the sixties and seventies were just gobbledygook…they didn’t make any sense at all.

In the late 1990’s I looked at my daughter’s math book. I opened her math book, and by chance, opened it to the first page of a particular chapter. It was all about “poor Juan” and his sad life in Central America. I said to my daughter, “This is your Social Studies book, I want to see your math book”. She informed me that I was looking at her math book. I looked closer, and it was indeed a math book, but the beginning of every chapter had several pages describing the life of some third-world child. After that, it showed poorly explained mathematical concepts.

If any of you out there have children that are failing math, please do them a favor. Find math books that were written before 1970, and preferably before 1965. This may sound like conspiracy theory looniness, but I believe that the objective decline in American education is due to the intentional influence of leftists on our educational curriculum. Please, do not let you, or your children, become victims.

LINK TO COLUMN: What exactly was the “new math”? - The Straight Dope

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Tom Lehrer-New Math

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Yep, it’s true. Despite being part of american society and directly affected by its economy and educational standards, I can find no better use of my time than make math more difficult for grade schoolers. :rolleyes:

And I was in grade school in the 90s. Our math books had no stories about Juan. Sounds like your district made a misstep in purchasing textbooks that year. I would advise against generalizing this to an entire country without doing a little bit more research.

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Juan plus Juan = 2. How much more basic does it get?

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Actually, 2 + 2 = 5 (for extremely large values of 2). :slight_smile:

I grew up more-or-less in that era too. New math wasn’t just gobbledygook, it was . . .

Well, yes it was too gobbledygook, sort of.

The problem, as I always saw it, was that Mathematicians who knew math but didn’t know how to teach math took over. To them, an abstract presentation was all that was necessary, and that’s what they presented.

I remember to this day the first introduction to this strange new concept of “negative” numbers. (Whaaaat? Numbers less than zero? WTF?). They started with the abstract definition, which went like this:

Now imagine springing this abstract and incomprehensible definition on a beginning algebra student, who might have no prior understanding of negative numbers. Clear as mud, no? Then, the text works through abstract definitions and axioms and stuff to develop the other properties of negative numbers. All abstractly. Now picture the entire semester developing like this.

That’s what was wrong with new math.

See Why Johnny Can’t Add: The Failure of the New Math by Morris Kline. You might be able to find it in your public library, if it hasn’t been closed due to funding cuts yet.

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I remember learning set theory at the beginning of each year in grades 1-4. Union, intersection, empty set. Then we never used it again the rest of the year. Complete waste of time.

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I’m a liberal and a progressive, but I’m sorry, I can’t quite wrap my mind around the way that education has been dumbed down. New Math was supposed to make math all perfectly clear to students. But I always wondered if the whole business wasn’t fixing something that wasn’t broke in the first place (as others up-thread have noted, along with everyone else who has ever criticized New Math).

From that day to this, there has been wave upon wave of New New Math, Even Newer New Math, New New New Math, (New)[sup]n[/sup] Math, etc. And each has been a worse disaster than the one before, IMHO.

A few years ago, I took the Calculus/DiffEq and Statistics classes at a JC. After finishing Stat, I tutored that and algebra. I looked through the Algebra book and couldn’t help but puking. I stormed into the office of the chairman of the Math/Science Dept and politely asked if he would mind terribly much if I chewed his ass up one wall and down the other for allowing such an awful book to be chosen. (I could talk like that because I had already been in his Finite Math and Calculus III classes and was on good terms with him.)

He politely told me that the reason they used that book was because every other text the committee reviewed was worse. So we then had a good long talk about how the quality of math instruction has gone down the tubes over the years, and how the textbooks were getting steadily shittier and shittier. One of his complaint was that they were increasingly emphasizing glitz over quality – he pointed to the profusion of glossy three-color graphs diagrams, that math students of a few generations earlier had all done fine without. My complaint focused mainly on the excessive and premature abstract expositions, and on the steady decrease in the depth of the content.

It’s not just math. All the academic subjects are watered down. That has been a major and widespread complaint for years. Neither I nor anybody else here on SDMB is the first to mention it. I had the same experience in my U. S. History classes – the texts were dumbed down and poorly written besides, and many students complained that they couldn’t follow it. So I guess the next edition will have to be dumbed down even more. The problem was that they were just downright poorly written.

I went to the nearby University library and got a REAL history text, written by several of the “Really Big Names” in U. S. History books. This book was about three times bigger than the class text. I read that in parallel with the assigned class text. With the added depth of detail, a whole lot of stuff really started to make sense, that wasn’t there in the class text. So like I said, it’s not just math.

ETA: Nowhere in the above-pitted algebra book could I find any occurrence of the word “axiom” nor any general discussion of what an axiom is, although a few of them were presented without much explanation.

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Here’s a cite I wanted to find, and now I’ve found it:

Mathematically Correct – Activist web site criticising New Math:

(Bolding and italics as seen.)

ETA: BTW, was the OP in response to a column published by the Master? If so, could somebody give a link to it?

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Was it this? – “What exactly was the ‘new math’?” by Ian, Jill, and Dex of SDSAB?

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Oh that liberal boogie monster. I’m always amused when my “conservative” friend expresses some viewpoint that I would consider stereotypically within the “liberal” wheelhouse. Apparently “liberal” just means “whatever I don’t like”.

Things always change. You may not like how someone tried to respond to that change with a new approach. If you don’t like it, suggest a different approach or create your own.

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A link to the column What exactly was the “new math”?

One thing it wasn’t was a leftist conspiracy.

The idea was that instead of teaching math by having kids memorize a bunch of procedures, they would be taught mathematical theory. And once they understood the theory behind math, the procedures would be obvious.

In the abstract, it wasn’t a bad idea. A person who understands the theoretical basis of a subject is going to have a better understanding than somebody who’s just memorized the facts.

But in practice, it’s very difficult to learn mathematical theory if you don’t already have a solid base of mathematical facts.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose it was Driver’s Ed instead of Math that was modernized. The traditional Driver’s Ed class would tell the student “sit down behind the wheel, put the key in the ignition, turn the key clockwise, and the car will start.”

In New Driver’s Ed class, the teacher pulls out a set of blueprints and begins by explaining how an engine works. He talks about internal combustion. He describes the pistons and valves and spark plugs. Then he explains the battery and alternator. Once the students understood all this, they would know that closing an electric circuit would start the engine running. And they’d understand it all much better than a student who was just told to turn the key.

But the student who turned the key and started the car is out on the road while the New Driver’s Ed student is learning about engines. As far as he knows the car may be powered by a hamster wheel but he has a lot more experience in actual driving.

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Leave my Yugo out of this! :smiley:

I got solidly nailed by ‘new math’ and had troubles my entire scholastic life about it.

Though it can also depend on the teacher - I went into public school in 9th grade, just as the regular teacher broke his leg and got sidelined for the year. The head of the department [the physics teacher] took over our class. There were a couple jackasses that discovered if you got him talking about stuff, you could derail the class off onto some other subject. For a 9th grader, I ended up with an amazing comprehension of mechanical engineering … but almost everybody in that class failed the subject and had to do summer school … [I think 3 people passed, barely:rolleyes:]

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The theory that all children have a right to an education is a leftist one anyway. Before the progressives ruined industrialisation, children could work 16 hour days from the age of 6 or so. I think the World Bank still doesn’t hold that denying children an education is a form of child abuse and doesn’t disinvest from countries with child labourers.

The good, conservative period where education was private (Victorian era) had a projected literacy rate of 20%, while people are complaining about slipping standards while the literacy rates throughout the developed world are above 90%.

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Back in the late sixties, when I was about thirteen, I started to teach myself a better way of taking apart numbers and got exceptionally good at math. Back then you had to show proof of how you did problems so I would get the answer within seconds and work backwards to fill in the proofs. I thought the way they taught us to work with numbers was stupid and the sliderule was a waste of time. I don’t even think calculators are necessary and see people using them to add little numbers instead of excercising their mind. While I was taking the meds for the epilepsy I noticed I had short term memory problems and found that I couldn’t add, subtract, multiply, or divide the way I was supposed to have learned in school. Learning the system that they were teaching would have been a good backup for those five years. Now my mind is back up and running and, although all of it didn’t come back, I can just look at numbers again and know the answer. Someone is teaching a system similar to my system in seminars but I evolved my system way past that. I always double checked my results with another system I developed so I could be sure I hadn’t erred. It still took less time than it would to punch it in a calculator. So what exactly is new math?

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I remember hitting New Math in fourth grade and hating it, not for the concepts that encrusted the pages, those were kind of cool. It was all the tedius make-work that made me hide my math book. Expanding numbers to show that you were multplying 3 x 1000 + 4 x 100 + 2 x 10 + 1 times (and I’m not going to expand another one just for decoration) in order to get a feel for what digits actually meant is OK for one set of homework. But I get it already. I got it from reading about it. I don’t need to do this for weeks of essentially penmanship to drive the idea home.

I remember seeing a video about learning to play piano for people who wanted to play in a band. The piano guy explained that most courses for learning piano drilled you in basics and theory so that you could go on, in the fullness of your years, to play concert style piano. But if you just want to play, here’s what you need to know. . .

I think that New Math was trying to set kids up for concert style math later when, really, most people are never going to go on to that. The kicker is that in order to make it available to the whole class, they made it so bone-crunchingly boring that the kids with a bent for math hated it, too.

To be fair, you’d probably have had no trouble going through New Math books as an adult either. You might have shaken your head and wondered why they were bothering with some of the concepts when you just wanted something practical and useful, but you’d have plowed right through. Adults have learned how to focus.

School textbooks are the results of a dance between publishers and politicians. The music they’re dancing to a combination of memories of their own learning experiences and the latest academic studies on theories of learning. When you have multiple committees reacting to each other, you can end up with some odd things.

Your idea to look for older textbooks is a very good one. Everyone has their own style of learning and finding a text that matches the student’s style makes learning easier. Seeing the same thing taught in different ways can also make things clearer. Not to mention the value of seeing how different times produce different texts.

You might also want to look for basic math texts aimed for adults. Most of the adult texts I’ve seen aren’t teaching concert math.

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swjslj, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, we’re glad to have you with us. For future ref, it’s helpful to other readers if you provide a link to the relevant column when you start a thread. Saves searching time and help keeps us on the same page, to avoid repetitions etc. No biggie, you’ll know for next time; I’ve edited the link at the bottom of your post; and, as I said, welcome!

Senegoid, please note: Staff Report: Does 2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2? :slight_smile:

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Ditto, but I was grateful since I found it pretty easy. As an adult though I’ve found a working knowledge of AND/OR/NOT useful for working with search engines, databases and occasionally programming. My parents who never learned that stuff still have problems with google.

Admittedly, we were presented with an odd method of long division once, which was supplanted with the traditional way the following year.

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I teach one of those new-new-math things, using a curriculum called Investigations. I really like it, and I think it does some stuff very well.

It sounds as though original New Math (yes, these terms are gonna grow old real fast) began with abstract concepts and moved toward examples. We approach things in the exact opposite manner.

When working with numbers up to 1,000, for example, kids voted on a small object to collect: they chose acorns. I gave them ziploc bags at recess, and they gathered acorns in groups of 10 (don’t worry, it was entirely voluntary; kids who wanted to go crazy on the monkey bars instead were welcome to do so). We took them back inside, sorted them, and verified each bag had 10 in it. Then we counted the bags by tens and examined how many bags of 10 it took to get 100 acorns. We put 10 bags in a pile, and re-counted by piles, bags, and by 10s of acorns. We made charts showing the correspondence between piles, bags, and acorns.

Students use this experience to solidify their understanding of place value. When a kid gets confused and tells me that 213+318=621, I can go back to the acorns, bags, and piles to help them understand where they made their error.

A lot of folks with strong mathematical minds have fond memories of the old way of doing math, the way where you don’t understand the underlying principles. It’s one of my favorite examples of circular thinking.

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Dex’s joke in the original article can be extended :
Teaching Math in 2002:
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $120. How does Arthur Andersen determine that his profit margin is $60?

Teaching Math in 2010:
El hachero vende un camion carga por $100. La cuesta de production es . . .
from here
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/770095/posts

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That’s funny because European-Americans are paranoid that they’ll become a minority in a country where their ancestors exterminated the natives.