Talking Math War Blues

So this little film from YouTube has been making the rounds of the Internets. I'll write more later, but I'm a little disturbed by the tone of some of the anti-"reform math" diatribes. Also, I think she overdoes the special pleading, using 6 x 10 = 60 twice, when the odds are that kids would also know 6 x 20 = 120, so she drew it out deliberately to make it more cumbersome. And as one of my smart friends points out, it's kind of a commercial for Singapore Math, including where to buy it (Ed. note: we used Singapore Math and liked it just fine--it's the product placement that's kind of annoying).

Also also? I thought my math education by and large sucked. I'm not married to how it was done in my day, nor do I think group work is the devil's doing. What I do have a problem with is the special pleading on the constructivist side: the implication that algorithms robotically teach math; the false dichotomy between emphasis on verbal explanation and rote understanding (surely there are other ways to teach deeper comprehension); the noses turned up at "drill and kill." And again, what I keep coming back to is "What does the research show?" How well do students learn with constructivist curricula, and are those gains consistent across different populations (again, my suspicion is that they are not, and that Investigations may be worse than Everyday Math for some groups)?

I've tried asking these questions at the district level, and one (nice, well-meaning) administrator cited approval from someone who was from Bank Street and someone else from Columbia. Which is argumentum ad hominem, the nice version, no? As Yeats wrote, citing his mentor John O'Leary, "There is no cause so bad that good men have not defended it for what seemed to them good reasons."

Save us from ideologues.