http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html?_r=1
Why Do Americans Stink at Math?
By Elizabeth Green
July 23, 2014
This article was recently published by the New York Times Magazine. It is a must read for any parent, teacher, or educational administrator. It highlights the need to change math education in the United States and why the change is unlikely to happen given our current system of professional development for teachers.
“To cure our innumeracy, we will have to accept that the traditional approach we take to teaching math — the one that can be mind-numbing, but also comfortingly familiar — does not work. We will have to come to see math not as a list of rules to be memorized but as a way of looking at the world that really makes sense.”
From my perspective as a teacher and a parent, I have found that the “one size fits all” strategy of teaching math is not effective. Some brains are just built to understand math easily, others are not. We do a good job at the elementary level, generally, differentiating instruction between students of varying abilities, but the individualization drops off for most kids in middle and high school. There, kids are too embarrassed, or don’t care anymore, to seek the help they need. Part of the problem at the secondary level is that the curriculum for math is too extensive and hurried… kids do not have the time/opportunity to practice and understand a concept or strategy enough to have it settle in firmly to their thinking. A typical math book is nearly 700 pages now at the high school. All but the brightest kids need more time, more practical applications of math, and a less-scattered approach to learn math. New strategies to explain one’s thinking in math, as well as time to effectively practice math (knowing what we do about how the brain works) will be helpful. People (students, teachers, parents) also have to develop the “learning disposition” or attitude that, for most of us, learning math takes effort, grit, practice, and the awareness that they CAN learn new things, and that their ability/knowledge level is not fixed.
At the beginning you said, “Some brains are just built to understand math easily, others are not.” Brain research has shown recently taught us that this belief is not true. I agree we need a much less scattered approach to teaching math with the need for students to make connections between what appears to be isolated skills.