More Fun with Numbers

So it seems the Heritage Foundation is starting to take an interest in my town's math wars. I can just imagine the spin. The commonsensical little guy taking on the elitist liberal educational establishment and bringing it to heel. Except, as with everything else in life, when you look closely, it's not what it first appears. The curriculum has been used successfully in other districts. Our special education scores were worse than other districts' (horrendously bad scores). The curriculum in question isn't implemented much in the middle school. The teachers in fact like the curriculum, which is why the district isn't getting rid of it, after all the fuss.

And yet this will appear to be a victory for traditionalism in the math wars. Not that I'm against traditionalism, but neither am I for a diet of times tables and math the way I was taught, which sucked. I didn't really learn to subtract with borrowing until I was an adult and thought for five minutes about what I was actually doing. Learning to estimate is actually a useful life and mathematical skill, and I see plenty of students at the high school level and beyond who do not know how to do it. I also teach plenty of kids coming from Catholic high schools (talk about traditional math!), and in general I would say their math skills, both at the computational and conceptual levels, are worse than those of the public school kids I work with. In short, there's not an easy answer and the problem seems to be multifactorial.

And yet, people like totalizing, unifying explanations, and I'm sure this will be reduced to something vastly less complicated than it is.