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The sad thing is that this isn't even a one-off. Education has been repeatedly rocked by "someone had a whacky idea and now it's the law of the land". The origi

by jerf 1y ago

The sad thing is that this isn't even a one-off. Education has been repeatedly rocked by "someone had a whacky idea and now it's the law of the land". The original "New Math", and several things after it labelled "New Math". "Whole word" reading, and a whole zoo of related "what if we took how we've been successfully teaching reading and just hypothesized that something else might work better maybe" initiatives. The concept of "learning modes", which everyone believes is real but science strongly suggests don't exist very strongly at all. The solution to every educational problem being to push standardized testing even harder. Just over and over.

gr8gatsbyghst 1y ago
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- cindyllm 1y ago
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BeFlatXIII 1y ago
IIRC, New Math (at least the original) had the strongest pilot success of the lot. However, it failed in mass adoption because teachers didn’t want to retrain and parents threw fits that they could no longer drill their kids in math facts using half-remembered methods from their schooling.
- jerf 1y ago
  I'd be intrigued to see that, at least if we're talking about the same New Math that was basically "Hey, let's teach kindergartners number theory and 'cardinality' and the soon-to-be-vital skill of doing math in octal so they can use computers". The name got tagged on to a lot of things over the years, and some of them have some merit, but I'd have a hard time believing the original New Math ever tested well in a fair analysis. It's a violation of basic developmental theory, expecting young children to handle levels of abstraction they won't be ready for for another 5-15 years to do basic concrete math.
  - tengwar2 1y ago
    I may be misremembering, but I think we had simple topology, linear programming (mainly just 2D, but I remember a 5D problem at the end of the section), matrices with eigenvalues and eigenvectors, set theory, and a bit of group theory. No programming, though there was some in the text book. It was pretty good fun. I don't remember anyone finding it conceptually difficult. It would also be worth mentioning Nuffield Physics. I thought that was a really great course for learning how to do physics. Very oriented towards finding solutions, devising experiments.
    - jerf 1y ago
      I don't think we're talking about the same thing. New Math was targeted at elementary school students. If you're having a hard time squaring that with "cardinality" and "set theory"... yeah, that would be the problem.
      - tengwar2 1y ago
        School Mathematics Project covered secondary school, and was very much part of the New Maths project. And yes, we did cover set theory in primary school.

by jerf 1y ago

gr8gatsbyghst 1y ago

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cindyllm 1y ago
[dead]

BeFlatXIII 1y ago

IIRC, New Math (at least the original) had the strongest pilot success of the lot. However, it failed in mass adoption because teachers didn’t want to retrain and parents threw fits that they could no longer drill their kids in math facts using half-remembered methods from their schooling.

jerf 1y ago
I'd be intrigued to see that, at least if we're talking about the same New Math that was basically "Hey, let's teach kindergartners number theory and 'cardinality' and the soon-to-be-vital skill of doing math in octal so they can use computers". The name got tagged on to a lot of things over the years, and some of them have some merit, but I'd have a hard time believing the original New Math ever tested well in a fair analysis. It's a violation of basic developmental theory, expecting young children to handle levels of abstraction they won't be ready for for another 5-15 years to do basic concrete math.
- tengwar2 1y ago
  I may be misremembering, but I think we had simple topology, linear programming (mainly just 2D, but I remember a 5D problem at the end of the section), matrices with eigenvalues and eigenvectors, set theory, and a bit of group theory. No programming, though there was some in the text book. It was pretty good fun. I don't remember anyone finding it conceptually difficult. It would also be worth mentioning Nuffield Physics. I thought that was a really great course for learning how to do physics. Very oriented towards finding solutions, devising experiments.
  - jerf 1y ago
    I don't think we're talking about the same thing. New Math was targeted at elementary school students. If you're having a hard time squaring that with "cardinality" and "set theory"... yeah, that would be the problem.
    - tengwar2 1y ago
      School Mathematics Project covered secondary school, and was very much part of the New Maths project. And yes, we did cover set theory in primary school.