#math wars

I appreciate a column in yesterday’s News and Observer, “Say No to Math Wars,” written by Paola Sztajn, a professor of elementary education at N.C State University.  She reminds us that we already fought this particular math war in the 1990’s, although I recall that we skirmished 40 years before that.  Being old has its advantages…. What math war is this?  The battle between proficiency/ fluency…

This week more than 10,000 educators will be invading the conference rooms of downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The event: The 2011 International Society for Technology in Education Conference and Exposition.

After listening to Dr. John Medina's opening keynote I cannot help but make some connections to the pendulum swing that is so often brought up in education in regards to teaching mathematics. I also cannot help but think that our most current attempts to improve student achievement in mathematics are noble but are off course.

I believe a particular part of Dr. Medina's keynote spoke to the continuous "math wars" being fought between those who believe in a traditional rote memorization approach to mathematics education and the problem centered approaches to teaching and learning math that exist in many public school classrooms today:

At the level of boulevards and alleyways, human learning in fairly easy to understand. You have two big powerful sets of cognitive gadgets, here they are: You have to create a database, and yep it has to be memorized, so I am a deep believer in memorizing and re-exposure. You have got to create a database, and then almost as soon as you have memorized something you have to be given the opportunity to improvise off of it, in order for the learning to become solid in the alleyways and boulevards. You take the idea of love which you learn as a database, and you improvise off it it with eyelashes going up and down and stars coming out of you. Or toilet seats. Or cologne. Any school system or any educational environment that only emphasizes one [memorization] or the other [improvisation] is failing the human brain. (starts at 42:10)

It seems like some traditional instruction and memorization exercises followed by some not obvious but related applications of the new math knowledge might be what we need right now to start getting the results we are all looking for in mathematics in this country.

At least that is what I thought before watching Dr. Medina response to a related question around 1:10:30 of the keynote.