# What the hell WAS new math?? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 6, 2009, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501 "2009-08-06T03:25:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BaneSidhe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c5a1d2/32.png) [@BaneSidhe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BaneSidhe)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/1 "2009-08-06T03:25:13Z")
I grew up in the 70’s and remember the horror that was “New Math.” I don’t remember much of what was taught, but to this day I’m still asking “What the hell was that?” Can anyone out there sort me out? ---
**Author:** ![Rico](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rico/32/3582_2.png) [@Rico](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rico)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/2 "2009-08-06T03:36:12Z")
My first year of elementary school was the first year of the “New Math.” Listen to Tom Lehrer’s [New Math](http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/t/tomlehrer3903/newmath185502.html) to understand the real reason: > [@](#): > > …but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer. It screwed me up so bad I really didn’t understand math until I got out of school and started formulating my own rules to mathematics. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/3 "2009-08-06T03:43:19Z")
> [@](#): > > New Math emphasized mathematical structure through abstract concepts like set theory and number bases other than 10. Beginning in the early 1960s the new educational doctrine was installed, not only in the USA, but all over the developed world. > > Much of the publicity centered on the focus of this program on set theory (influenced ultimately by the Bourbaki group and their work), functions, and diagram drawings. It was stressed that these subjects should be introduced early. Some of this focus was seen as exaggerated, even dogmatic. For example, in some cases pupils were taught axiomatic set theory at an early age.[1] The idea behind this was that if the axiomatic foundations of mathematics were introduced to children, they could easily cope with the theorems of the mathematical system later. > > Other topics introduced in the New Math include modulo arithmetic, algebraic inequalities, matrices, symbolic logic, Boolean algebra and abstract algebra.[2] Most of these topics (except algebraic inequalities) have been greatly de-emphasized or eliminated since the 1960s. > **[New Math](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_math)** > > New Mathematics or New Math was a dramatic but temporary change in the way mathematics was taught in grade schools which started in France and spread to many other countries between 1950s and 1970s. > Following World War II, the Western world underwent substantial economic and technological transformations and the training of scientists and engineers was seen as crucial for further economic growth. Furthermore, in the context of the Cold War, the launch of the world's first artificial satellite Sp... ---
**Author:** ![Washoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ecae2f/32.png) [@Washoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Washoe)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/4 "2009-08-06T04:01:29Z")
> [@Rico](#): > > It screwed me up so bad I really didn’t understand math until I got out of school and started formulating my own rules to mathematics. Yep, worked like a charm. Sometime in the early to mid-eighties (I think it was 1984, to be precise) I took an expository course in basic inorganic chemistry intended for nursing and allied health majors at a community college. Most of the people in the class would have been born in the mid-sixties or earlier. At the beginning of the class following the first examination, the instructor walked in with our graded tests, and without saying a word, casually rifled through them as if he were looking for something. Suddenly he looked up and said “it appears that about a fourth of you don’t know how to multiply.” And he wasn’t being facetious or talking about casual errors in our computations. He literally meant that one out of four students in the class did not know how to multiply one number by another without using a calculator. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/5 "2009-08-06T04:01:41Z")
[SDMB Staff Report](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1529/what-exactly-was-the-new-math) ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/6 "2009-08-06T04:16:26Z")
After 4th grade I didn’t use Set Theory until a programming course in college. ---
**Author:** ![jasonh300](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/46a35a/32.png) [@jasonh300](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jasonh300)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/7 "2009-08-06T04:25:04Z")
I started school in 1979 and the school I went to never did any of this. I wonder if the “new reading” methods will go away soon too. If I hadn’t taught my kids basic phonics before they started school, they wouldn’t be able to read now. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/8 "2009-08-06T05:08:25Z")
> [@](#): > > Much of the publicity centered on the focus of this program on set theory (influenced ultimately by the Bourbaki group and their work)… I’m not familiar with that group. What’s the operator over it? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Notassmartasithought](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c0e974/32.png) [@Notassmartasithought](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Notassmartasithought)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/9 "2009-08-06T05:34:18Z")
Does any one remember SMSG, which I remember as Science Mathematics Study Group. That was my math curriculum in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. ---
**Author:** ![UncaStuart](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/uncastuart/32/404_2.png) [@UncaStuart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncaStuart)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/10 "2009-08-06T05:45:27Z")
> [@Notassmartasithought](#): > > Does any one remember SMSG, which I remember as Science Mathematics Study Group. That was my math curriculum in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. I don’t remember it, except that reading “SMSG” provoked some deep dread to resurface. I was new-math’ed starting in seventh grade in school year '59-60 and have been a math phobe ever since. ---
**Author:** ![Notassmartasithought](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/c0e974/32.png) [@Notassmartasithought](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Notassmartasithought)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 6:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/11 "2009-08-06T06:05:49Z")
I’ve got to say SMSG worked for me; I’ve never been math challenged, and have always been of the opinion that the commonly acknowledged “math phobia” is both false and detrimental to everyone, everyplace. ---
**Author:** ![Cunctator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/43a26b/32.png) [@Cunctator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cunctator)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 6:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/12 "2009-08-06T06:34:31Z")
Were Cuisenaire rods part of it too? ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/13 "2009-08-06T06:38:51Z")
Don’t put Cuisenaire rods in the Cuisinart. Lesson learned at age 4. ---
**Author:** ![Nicolas\_Bourbaki](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecc23a/32.png) [@Nicolas\_Bourbaki](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nicolas_Bourbaki)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 6:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/14 "2009-08-06T06:39:10Z")
> [@Johnny\_L.A](#): > > Much of the publicity centered on the focus of this program on set theory (influenced ultimately by the Bourbaki group and their work)… Oh, sure, blame the pseudonymous guy. 😛 But really, it was Sputnik. The government was scared of being beaten by the Reds in science, so they had some eggheads rewrite the nation’s math books to ensure a bumper crop of more eggheads. It was a sensible idea on paper, and it’s good to emphasize things like Venn diagrams and the fact that there’s nothing magical about base ten. The real problem with it, IMUnqualifiedO, was that the teachers didn’t have any idea what they were doing any more than the students did, and that had a much greater effect on the students than the actual content. There’s a [thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=527106) about teachers who have no idea what they’re talking about, and pretty much all of them sound pretty irritable. If you get responses like that to an honest question about what exactly you’re doing, it can cause a little resentment toward the subject. Obviously, the goal in teaching math is the idea of it as the study of why things are one way and not another, but teaching it rote, as the application of arbitrary rules on a string of characters, will at least give you a good grasp of arithmetic. Teaching math (or anything else) as the reading of nonsense words in a textbook is a waste of time for everyone, and the subjects that’re taught that way at your school are the subjects you’re gonna hate for the rest of your life. ---
**Author:** ![threemae](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5f9b8f/32.png) [@threemae](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/threemae)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 7:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/15 "2009-08-06T07:19:13Z")
Hmm, that’s interesting. I had always understood the New Math to represent a lack of rigor in mathematical education, but in fact it seems to be an attempt to get students to understand concepts that are, frankly, very likely to be far beyond the capabilities of 99.5% of 5th graders. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 7:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/16 "2009-08-06T07:28:37Z")
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the Bourbaki group: > **[Nicolas Bourbaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki)** > > Nicolas Bourbaki (French: \[nikɔla buʁbaki\]) is the collective pseudonym of a group of mathematicians, predominantly French alumni of the École normale supérieure (ENS). Founded in 1934–1935, the Bourbaki group originally intended to prepare a new textbook in analysis. Over time the project became much more ambitious, growing into a large series of textbooks published under the Bourbaki name, meant to treat modern pure mathematics. The series is known collectively as the Éléments de mathématique (... It was an attempt to make sure that all of mathematics was rigorously proved. There was nothing inherently wrong with the New Mathematics curriculum. It was badly handled though. The teachers should have been better trained for teaching it. It’s necessary to do both some memorization of facts and some explanation of the ideas. The low-level set theory being taught wasn’t really that difficult and, when correctly taught, could be easily learned by kids, although it should have been put off a few years later in elementary school. I think a lot of the complaining about it was just parents saying, “I don’t understand why kids are being taught something I never learned. Don’t the schools know that there’s no new knowledge out there?” ---
**Author:** ![Noel\_Prosequi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b19c9b/32.png) [@Noel\_Prosequi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noel_Prosequi)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 8:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/17 "2009-08-06T08:36:13Z")
> [@Cunctator](#): > > Were Cuisenaire rods part of it too? Ah, Cuisenaire rods. I can still chant the colour order. And if pressed, I could still repack a box. They are a powerful nostalgia cue. I’m pretty sure that they were part of the New Maths because I was taught with them, and I was also taught all that Venn diagram, bases other than 10 stuff. And I do OK at maths, given that it is relatively tangential (note gratuitous insertion of maths concept) to my job. But as a 5 year old, I never quite got the point of Cuisenaire rods. They were fun blocks to build stuff with as a distraction from their real purpose, but as I say, what I took from them was all the rote learning stuff that you were forced to undertake as a preliminary step in approaching the Deep Magic. The boxes had to be repacked after use in exactly the right way, or classroom chaos would have ensued. You had to remember the colours or you wouldn’t have been able to attach numerical significance to adding two Light Green rods to get a Dark Green. And a fundamental issue with the use of analogue teaching devices like the rods is the absence of any way to analogically represent zero. With the rods, you are still stuck with the mathematics of Roman numerals. The idea of something as basic as the principle behind “10” (a one in the tens column and a zero in the ones column) is not readily conveyed with rods, even though they went up to 10. ---
**Author:** ![Marlitharn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/779978/32.png) [@Marlitharn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marlitharn)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 9:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/18 "2009-08-06T09:49:35Z")
My husband tells me they sprang New Math on him in the mid 60s, when he would have been about middle school aged, and he’s hated math ever since. Me, I’m 18 years younger than him, and nothing mentioned in this thread sounds familiar to me, so I assume I was taught Plain Old Math. I do remember being taught how to add and subtract on an abacus. I’m okay with what I call “household and shopping math” (modifying recipes, calculating costs per unit, using a tape measure, that kind of thing) but anything more complicated than that makes my brain fade to gray. ---
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 10:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/19 "2009-08-06T10:28:54Z")
I liked New Math. I think it helped steer me into technical work and am very glad. Alternate number bases, set theory, and functions are three parts of it I remember finding interesting. What it may have done most of all is instill in me the feeling that math was the intriguing way humans were working out a kind of thinking, rather than a family of rules and statements. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2009, 11:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501/20 "2009-08-06T11:06:21Z")
The problem for some of us was that we had advanced beyond our grades, and we had been taught the old way. You know, carry the 1 and all that. Then suddenly, out of the blue (as far as we were concerned) we entered the grade where carrying the 1 would apply, but there was no carrying the 1. There was instead this long, drawn out process of splitting everything into how many hundreds, how many tens, and how many ones, and then adding those together. It caused mass confusion among people in the advanced classes because we were already doing things the old way, and it worked fine. The new way seemed like a lot of trouble for nothing. And don’t even get me started on “long division”. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-the-hell-was-new-math/505501.md?page=2)