When I was finalizing my car purchase, I was wondering if they had the right tax rate (since I was buying the car in Indiana). They were charging me $1597.80 on a $26,630 car. Did I pull out my paper and pencil? No. I used Excel. What other way would I have done it? Well, 5% would be about 1332, add another 1% of 266, and that's about 1600. How come they don't teach us those tricks in school? How come they don't spend more time on estimating, which is much more useful than calculating stuff to the hundreths digit by hand?
The "President-elect of the American Mathematical Society" (wow what a prestigious honor) who is also mentioned in this story is someone who does NOT get it. The best is the last quote of the article: ""Math is hard. The idea that somehow we're going to make math just fun is just a dream." This guy obviously is high on himself because he can do long division. He's the poster child of what's wrong with education.
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Fractions should be scrapped!
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"Fractions have had their day, being useful for by-hand calculation," DeTurck said as part of a 60-second lecture series. "But in this digital age, they're as obsolete as Roman numerals are."
The speech started a firestorm, particularly after the university posted it online.
"There were blogs and rants, and there were some critical e-mails," said DeTurck, who is now dean of the college of arts and sciences at Penn. "They'd always boil down to: 'What would we do in cooking and carpentry?' "
DeTurck is stirring the pot again, this time in a book scheduled to be published this year. Not only does he favor the teaching of decimals over fractions to elementary school students, he's also taking on long division, the calculation of square roots and by-hand multiplication of long numbers.
"Mathematicians are always questioning the axioms. Everybody knows that questioning those often results in the most substantial gains in terms of progress," he says.
Questioning the wisdom of teaching fractions to young students doesn't compute with people such as George Andrews, a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University and president-elect of the American Mathematical Society. "All of this is absurd," Andrews said. "No wonder mathematical achievements in the country are so abysmal.
"Arithmetic is the basic skill. If children do not know arithmetic, they can't go on to algebra, which leads to calculus. From there you go on to other things," Andrews said. "It's fine to talk about it, but this is not a good pedagogy."
Others see value in both fractions and decimals. To Janine Remillard, associate professor of education at Penn, the decimal system is "incredibly powerful." And fractions can be a powerful steppingstone to understanding decimals, she says.
"Fractions, if taught well — and that's a huge caveat — can actually help kids understand the value of the size of the pieces," Remillard says.
DeTurck does not want to abolish the teaching of fractions and long division altogether. He believes fractions are important for high-level mathematics and scientific research. But it could be that the study of fractions should be delayed until it can be understood, perhaps after a student learns calculus, he said. Long division has its uses, too, but maybe it doesn't need to be taught as intensely.
Penn State mathematician Andrews says he believes DeTurck's ideas will "unfortunately" gain traction because of the misguided belief that math education can somehow be made easy:
"Math is hard. The idea that somehow we're going to make math just fun is just a dream."
10 comments:
interesting post. How're your plans for that new school system coming along?
Dale - GREAT article! As soon as the stock market went to decimals, I think fractions should have been abandoned. But seriously, I'll send my kids to your new school system as long as they don't havr to learn cursive writing. There is a lot of useless stuff in school that we could cut and make room for progress. Also basic finance and accounting needs to be taught ala "Real World. Real Money" type of classes in Junior High. No one knows to save for retirement or what credit cards are all about! I think school was geared towards the industrial age where you learn to be a cog in a wheel, but in the information age we need to teach kids to think for themselves and start their own businesses (which by the way most people had to do in the agrarian age).
I will admit that I cannot remember the last time I used long division.
However, I use(d) fractions (routinely) and on Tuesday night. I had to hang a framed piece of art exactly square on a wall. I grabbed a piece of paper and pencil, drew a rough sketch of the wall and the art. Then took measurements, converted all numbers to a common denominator and worked through the numbers. I could have estimated the picture on the wall just by eyeing it, but even being off 1" to the left, means you are off on both sides so it becomes noticeable.
I worked a fair bit in carpentry growing up and, just as the article mentioned, that pretty much only uses fractions. Now, if we can shift that to decimals, then the new age of kids learning can then learn a new way.
Just like the metric system. I've always used inches so by default I think it's easier, however I can easily see the case for a system based consistently on factors of 10.
To Tom's point, I plan on supplementing any F&A education that high school teaches Nic with more real world economics. Matter of fact, I hope that Nic goes in to high school already prepared to easily pass that level of a finance class. (wishful thinking, but I think attainable)
Jim's on it. I don't think enough parents realize the importance of their role in their child's education.
In addition to carpentry, they mentioned cooking. Cooking doesn't *require* fractions! What the crap are they thinking? Just measure everything by weight instead of volume. :D Plus it's more accurate by weight, if something needs to be exact, and other things you can just *estimate* anyway - a pinch, a handful, a splash, etc.
It really takes just a short time (one or two generations) to adjust the "norms". Additonally, it means you dirty up/buy/store fewer dishes - no measuring utensils.
Random question: do you estimate distance by saying it is "zero point six miles", or do you say it's "six tenths of a mile"?
I forgot to say one other thing - I think fractions are 1/4 as useful today as when we were kids! I think our schools could spend at least 1/2 as much time on these pointless things.
i thought like you did martha (hmm...imagine that...wonder why) about saying fractions vs decimals (i was writing my rent check), but you already answered your question...that's a mindset that can be changed relatively quickly, if necessary. but i'm old school and stick to my fractions!
*What if some fractions are reading this blog?*
Martha - to your earlier question, I would answer it as "six-tenths of a mile".
As a side note, that is one kind of funny difference I noticed when I moved from country living to city living... everyone in the city referes to distance in "minutes" and everyone in country refers to it in "miles". I guess in the country it more directly translates 1:1.
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