To continue the math conversation

Dear Readers: last week I shared with a few friends on Facebook and elsewhere an interesting commentary in the Times, How to Fix Our Math Education

In response, Marilyn, a good friend and retired high school Math teacher of 38 years, writes today’s thoughtful guest blog.

To continue the math conversation:

      I always sat with a very unpopular viewpoint among my math educator colleagues. The current curriculum was instituted pre-Sputnik to create a generation of engineers. This curriculum needs to be available to some, but 99% of our students do NOT pursue engineering, and yet we subject 100% of our population to a curriculum which does not suit many of them. Yes, it can be a valuable set of mental exercises, but this can be accomplished through other disciplines in more relevant settings. Furthermore, I think it's criminal that this curriculum is a gatekeeper which, over decades, has prevented some really great minds from higher education.

     Sol Garfunkle, who wrote the article you posted, has a video series (which I used at Delta) on Discrete Mathematics - a series of disconnected topics related to management and information sciences (such as graph theory, cryptography, bin packing, etc.). There are many unsolved problems in the field, because, I feel, young learners are not introduced to these topics. I had the great fortune to study with the top mathematicians in the field through three summer NSF grants in the 90's.

     The NSF has been trying to push for Discrete Math even as early as an elementary school curriculum. It taps both sides of the brain, is very hands-on, and the issues are extremely relevant. I piloted the 1st Discrete Math course in the U.S. for 9th and 10th grades at Delta, using the galleys from the then, unpublished text. I in-serviced the HS math dept., which led to the introduction of a D.M. course as a senior alternative to calculus. It seemed to energize some of the HS staff. As a student in the 60's, I never saw D.M. until I was a junior in college as a math major, and it was presented in a traditional, theoretical way. I was blown away by what I learned from the NFS crowd.

     At Delta, though I taught the traditional curriculum., I created several other "alternative" courses, such as D.M., Personal Finance (checking accounts, investments, leases, car insurance, mortgages, how to do taxes, etc.,) Symbolic Logic, Statistics, Problem Solving (introducing the heuristics of Polya, using games, puzzles, traditional conundrums.) Our kids could meet the HS math credit requirements through a variety of means. But then came PSSA's.

     Over time enrollment dropped so low for some of these courses that we had to drop them from the curriculum - students did not sign up for them because the topics are not tested in the PSSA's. So much for autonomy to use good practices.

      So as Sol says in his article - keep the engineering curriculum for those interested and suited, but give the rest of the kids accessible, interesting, relevant math content.

My 2 cents, Marilyn