Fuzzy Math Fizzles

Now that a generation of students have been experimented on with a liberal arts approach to math, having had to suffer through the frustration and idiocy of "math journals", relief comes in this report. WSJ:

The nation's math teachers, on the front lines of a 17-year curriculum war, are getting some new marching orders: Make sure students learn the basics.

In a report to be released today, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents 100,000 educators from prekindergarten through college, will give ammunition to traditionalists who believe schools should focus heavily and early on teaching such fundamentals as multiplication tables and long division.

The council's advice is striking because in 1989 it touched off the so-called math wars by promoting open-ended problem solving over drilling. Back then, it recommended that students as young as those in kindergarten use calculators in class.

Those recommendations horrified many educators, especially college math professors alarmed by a rising tide of freshmen needing remediation. The council's 1989 report influenced textbooks and led to what are commonly called "reform math" programs, which are used in school systems across the country.

The new approach puzzled many parents. For example, to solve a basic division problem, 120 divided by 40, students might cross off groups of circles to "discover" that the answer was three.

Infuriated parents dubbed it "fuzzy math" and launched a countermovement. The council says its earlier views had been widely misunderstood and were never intended to excuse students from learning multiplication tables and other fundamentals.

Nevertheless, the council's new guidelines constitute "a remarkable reversal, and it's about time," says Ralph Raimi, a University of Rochester math professor.

NCTM site and intro to new guidelines here.

Add this to the war on boys in our schools (also here), agitprop in social sciences and science itself and the teachers' union's rewards for mediocrity, public schools, urban and suburban, have been dumbing down for years, with predictable consequences.

The fatally flawed curriculum is documented in City Journal's essay, "How Not to Teach Math" by Matthew Clavel.

Another illustration of the need for school choice, so you don't have education "experts" and the public schools marching in lemming-like lockstep off a curriculum cliff, taking our children with them.