Did you ever encounter "new math"? My children and new math were in school together, and try as I would, I didn't have the slightest idea of what the dear ones were talking about.
I knew it was based on the binary system, but just how and why escaped me. It was all ones and zeros in anticipation of the electronic age, I guessed. It's since vanished from math class, and for a while, 2+2 was back in fashion.
But only for a brief spell. Students are now learning another new math, which made helping grandson a bit of a challenge the other evening. It has a lot of estimates rather than answers.
It's rather fun to see the problems being estimated, and I think it leads to the right answer eventually, but clearly, the right answer is not the top priority; the thought process is.
GO BACK TO THE BASICS
Now the Board of Education, in their wisdom, has decided that students will not need to pass the WASL tests for math and science until 2013 to graduate from high school.
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, I suggest that rather than postponing the tests or redoing them, maybe they ought to consider having teachers revert to teaching adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, even though it means teaching - horror of horrors - by rote and, in the interest of learning to reason, word problems, as well.
There is value in new math and today's math, but you can't enlarge upon a subject until you know the basic rules of the subject.
Wouldn't it be better to devote time to improving students' math skills than to push the date for passing the WASL back or dumbing the test down? Putting the same amount of energy into teaching math as is devoted to passing the test seems a much better use of school time than is teaching to the test.
Obviously, the students are not doing too well on the WASL, but why?
Apparently, there are as many reasons as there are people who ask the question. I'm sure teachers want to teach students what they need to know to succeed. I'm almost as sure students want to be able to do well on tests, especially when it means graduating or not graduating, finishing high school or dropping out, thinking that they can get a GED later if they need it.
MAYBES
I haven't read the tests; I only know what I read in the newspapers, as Will Rogers used to say.
But maybe the tests are far beyond what students are normally required to know in the grades in which they're tested.
Maybe the state is out of step with the curriculum at the local level.
Maybe the Powers That Be have established a perfect level of knowledge for each grade that isn't 100-percent attainable, or maybe questions on the WASL have little relevance to students' real world.
Maybe there's a place for just plain memorizing such mundane subjects as multiplication tables in case your calculator's battery dies and your fingers are exhausted.
Maybe we need to entice the very best, trained teachers to the schools where failure and dropping out are most prevalent.
Lest I sound like an ancient who used to walk 6 miles to school in 8 feet of snow, I don't think the way learning in the olden days was perfect - far from it. I don't have the answers to these questions, nor am I at all sure I could pass any of the tests.
There's much good in the new math, but maybe we've thrown out the baby with the bath water in our efforts to make learning new and exciting.
Sometimes in life you just have to do the grunge work before you can fly.
Roberta Cole can be reached via e-mail at mptimes@ nwlink.com.
[[In-content Ad]]
