Bad Math Education
goodmath | May 20, 2008 A bunch of people have been mailing me links to an article from USA today
about schools and grading systems. I think that most of the people who've
been sending it to me want me to flame it as a silly idea; but I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to focus on an issue of presentation. What they're talking about could be a good idea, or it could be a bad idea - but because the
way that they present it leaves out crucial information, it's not possible to meaningfully judge the soundness of the concept.
This is very typical of the kind of rubbish we constantly see in
the popular press…
goodmath | February 1, 2008 A bunch of people have been sending me links to a USA Today article about a math professor who wants to change math education. Specifically, he wants to stop teaching fractions, and de-emphasize manual computation like multiplication and long division.
Frankly, reading about it, I'm pissed off by both sides of the argument.
On one side, you've got Professor DeTurck, who wants to abolish fractions, in favor of teaching children only decimals. This is a perfect example of an out-of-touch academic making idiotic proposals.
To be abundantly clear, I don't think that academics are, in general…
goodmath | October 15, 2007 Today we've got a bit of a treat. I've been holding off on this for a while, because I wanted to do it justice. This isn't the typical wankish crackpottery, but rather a deep and interesting bit of crackpottery. A reader sent me a link to a website of a mathematics professor, N. J. Wildberger, at the University of New South Wales, which contains a long, elegant screed against the evils of set theory, titled "Set Theory: Should You Believe?"
It's an interesting article - and I don't mean that sarcastically. It's over the top, to the point of extreme silliness in places, but the basic idea…
goodmath | May 16, 2007 Have you ever wondered about the real reason why math education in our schools is so awful? Why despite the best efforts of large numbers of parents, the schools seem to be incapable of figuring out why they're so dreadfully bad at recognizing the difference between a halfway decent math curriculum and a trendy piece of garbage?
Read below the fold for a perfect example of why. The short version: the people who are involved in running education in America consider it perfectly acceptable to be idiots when it comes to math.
My kids go to school in the Arsdley school district in Westchester…