Last year, I remarked on a TED talk from mathemagician Arthur Benjamin, who argued for the displacement of Calculus by Statistics in the hierarchy of high school mathematics. This year, TED has sponsored a talk by high school math teacher Dan Meyer, who discusses what, in his view, are the major problems with the way mathematics . . . → Read More: Patient Problem Solving
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Late last year, a study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which tried to pin down origins for the gender gap in mathematics education. As I’ve discussed before, the gender gap in math education is shrinking, and has been shown to be less about biology and more about culture – in cultures . . . → Read More: Gender Gap Genesis Earlier this month, Wired published an article written by Daniel Roth, enticingly titled “Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education.” It serves as an interesting counterpoint to the commonly used argument that the best way to reform education is to better integrate it with the most current technology, so that going to school feels less like . . . → Read More: Reforming Education through Geek Chic Let me begin by saying that, in response to the question Why is 9/09/09 so special?, my response is simple: it’s not. In fact, I would argue that 09/08/09 is much more interesting. This claim has nothing to do with numerology, and everything to do with President Obama’s speech to the youth of America on the . . . → Read More: Make Money Money, Make Money Money Money! (and Learn Math, too) I recently had the pleasure of stumbling across Paul Lockhart’s essay, A Mathematician’s Lament. Lockhart, a former research mathematician in analytic number theory who received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1990, decided to leave academia in 2000 in order to concentrate on K-12 math education, which he hass been doing at Saint Ann’s School in . . . → Read More: Read a Mathematician’s Lament A friend recently shared with me the following video from TED (see below). In it, mathematician (or, in this case, mathemagician) Arthur Benjamin gives a brief argument for eliminating calculus as the top of the “mathematical pyramid” in high school education, and replacing it probability and statistics. The main reason for this shift is . . . → Read More: Restructuring the Math Pyramid? Here’s an interesting article about Tom Farber, a high school Calculus teacher from San Diego who is fighting tough economic times and cutbacks in education spending in a rather novel way – he’s selling ad space on math tests. The goal here certainly doesn’t seem to be the development of a second income. Many teachers report . . . → Read More: Commodify your Mathematics? Even though we’d like to accuse our math teachers of being more or less incompetent, there is at least one indication that math education in this country is making some progress. In particular, the results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study shows American students have gained 11 points over their average performance . . . → Read More: Math in the News: Maybe the Sky Isn’t Falling, After All It looks like middle school math teachers can’t catch a break. According to a recent study, a significant percentage of math teachers in grades 5-8 do not have a degree or a certification in math. Sadly, the numbers are even worse for schools in low income areas. While it’s certainly true that you don’t need a . . . → Read More: Math in the News: Are Math Teachers Really Only One Chapter Ahead? Earlier this month, the New York Times ran an article about the dearth of U.S. students with strong skills in mathematics. While this is not quite a revelation, it is made more timely by the recent release of a study that looked at data from Putnam exams, International Mathematical Olympiads, and data from other programs meant . . . → Read More: Math in the News: Is U.S. Culture Crushing Potential Mathletes? |
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