BC Prof Suggests Young Children Need Less Formal Math, Not More 427
DesScorp writes "Professor Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist and researcher at Boston College, recounts an experiment done in New Hampshire schools in 1929, where math was completely taken out of the curriculum of the poorest schools from the area until the sixth grade. The results were surprising; with just one year of math under their belts, the poor students did as well or better than students from better schools by the end of the sixth grade year, despite the fact that the better schools had math in their curriculum all throughout elementary school. Professor Gray thinks children are not mentally wired for the kind of formal math instruction that is taught in schools, and that we'd be better served by putting off the teaching of theory until the seventh grade. He scoffs at the notion that if children are failing with current levels of math instructions then we should double down and make them do more math in school."
Re:Set Theory (Score:5, Informative)
Hello. I was a victim of New Math.
New Math presented me with set theory in elementary school.
Symbolic logic is not a mystery to me. Indeed, I aced a logic course where over half the people dropped it like a hot rock in the first week.
However, arithmetic with pencil and paper is like pulling teeth for me. I hate it with a passion. Learning how to do square roots in 7'th grade by pencil and paper was torture. Thank Glub for calculators.
So yes, your professor is entirely correct. Teaching set theory preps students for boolean algebra and all that happy nonsense. There are trade-offs, though.
--
BMO
Oh fuck. (Score:3, Informative)
I just replied to Math Skills For Programmers - Necessary Or Not? http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/03/25/0312233 [slashdot.org]
I want round up a posse to go 'round to this fool's house and beat him to life with a clue-stick. Anyone?
Not formally wired! Are we formally wired to take this git's* opinion seriously? Are we formally wired to work 9 to 5, or eat burgers, or browse /.?
Here's a delicious quote from the article (I know, I know):
"For some years I had noted that the effect of the early introduction of arithmetic had been to dull and almost chloroform the child's reasoning facilities."
Bwahahaa!
Then:
"It appears that the higher scores of the affluent districts are not due to superior teaching but to the supplementary informal 'home schooling' of children."
My, you don't say!
It finishes with:
"At the present time it seems clear that we are doing more damage than good by teaching math in elementary schools. Therefore, I'm with Benezet. We should stop teaching it. In my next post--about two weeks from now--I'm going to talk about how kids who don't go to traditional schools learn math with no or very little formal instruction. If you have a story to tell me about such learning, which might contribute to that post, please tell it in the comments section below or email it to me at grayp@bc.edu"
If Satan is keen on ignorance I reckon he's got a special place in Hell for this dick.
*I'm very glad Linus re-introduced this word to the mainstream of popular culture. It's a term of singular contempt, and I should know, I'm Irish.