Why Do Americans Stink at Math?

[Pholus]

9. I am a professor in the hard sciences...

and have waited anxiously for years to see where my children were going to "fall off the wagon" when the curriculum and teachers would fail them. After all, everyone told me it was going to happen. My colleagues all warned me to put my kids in private schools because of it. Television media every year talks about failures in the education system and "Waiting for Superman" was supposed to depict the failure the system was.

You know what I found examining things first hand?

That the curriculum was thoughtful and elegant. In second grade the foundations were laid so that intuitively the students understood the "two equation two unknown" problem that personally I do not remember getting until algebra. My eldest child is a full two years ahead in math compared to my own time in school, having just finished a geometry course in 8th grade. We had a talk about the quadratic equation last year, three years ahead of when it was introduced for me.

I have yet to encounter a teacher whose math credentials were a problem or whose enthusiasm was questionable.

The only criticism I would level after nine years of watching is that the newfangled "intuitive" way they teach of doing division involves a grouping method which is computationally awkward for larger than four digit numbers where the old fashioned "algorithmic" method scales to arbitrary number sizes. I made sure my child knew the method that your NYTIMES article specifically pans ("put numbers in the house&quot simply because it always WORKS.

Now what I have seen plenty of are failures on the parts of my fellow parents who allow their children to screw off because that's what they did or because they won't need math given what they'll be doing. I have seen the subject dismissed by parents and children as "unnecessary" and "geeky." And I have seen a deluge of popular media totally decrying the importance of the subject -- "Math is hard" Barbie came from somewhere, right? Never mind the role it plays in developing critical thinking skills -- if it ain't what you do every day it ain't necessary -- that is the mindset at work here.

Nope, solving this "education problem" has never been about teachers and curriculums. The right wanted unions destroyed and the corporate elements saw education tax dollars as a huge profit center. So "blame the teachers" breaks the union and "blame the curriculum" opens up business opportunities.

Note that I am not saying that this particular mathematical "tactic" is a bad thing -- just highly disputing two things about it.

1) that it will be a panacea and questioning the motives behind its publicity.
2) that it actually improves comprehension over the long term as a student advances from grade school to higher mathematics.

Articles like this that indicate that education is all wrong and that we just merely need to "wake up" annoy the heck out of me because this particular one of America's problems, like so many others, is about self motivation -- not about its teachers doing something simple wrong. I don't see that changing.