I read those comments and immediately thought of this.

Dan, Why are you wasting the cpu cycles (your brain’s and your computer’s) reading what those people are saying? It will just P_ss you off.

Let them home educate their kids and complain about public schools. That is their right and choice. We’ll be here when their kids need math help.

Keep doing what you’re doing. It is all about thinking. If we can keep our students thinking, they will be able to do the basics.

I think it’s good to see what some people are “thinking.” As an admitted progressive in the Math Wars (though I never think of myself as a warrior; I’m more in the espionage, counter-intelligence end of things, with a lot of my open efforts involved in countering propaganda and disinformation, hopefully in the tradition of Gerald Bracey and others), I don’t think it’s possible to do good work in mathematics education without incurring the wrath of the lunatics. I would call them a fringe, but they aren’t QUITE enough on the fringe for my taste. They tend to be well-connected to powerful and influential and RICH people and organizations who, unlike NCTM and NCSM, know how to win friends, influence people (particularly naive and ignorant ones, along with those easily panicked into reactive behavior), and perhaps most importantly KNOW HOW TO GET THEIR MESSAGE OUT. NCTM never has and likely never will.

I know Dan is uncomfortable being labeled “Math Education Future” (a reference to what Jon Landau, I think, once called Bruce Springsteen), but he is. He’s also not alone, but from what I’ve seen of his work, he’s one of the absolute best we’ve got. It’s not necessary, however, for him to take sides openly. All he needs to do is to do what he does. People like me will happily take on the ass-hats, nay-sayers, and Grumpy Old Men (including the 23 year old Grumpy Old Men).

It’s what I do extremely well. If I were as innovative as Dan, I’d be doing what he does instead. But the trick is to learn where one is most effective and not be afraid to commit to building on that. I’m a synthesizer, as well as someone who knows something great when I see it. But I never worship blindly and always question, probe, and push at the edges of the envelope.

Don’t fret, Dan. You don’t have to invest too much thought or energy in these people. But do be aware of them. It’s silly to pretend that they don’t exist or underestimate (as NCTM has tried to do for nearly two decades), their willingness and ability to do harm or try to do it.

The same sentiments at KTM cross national boundries. Reassuring?

http://www.wiskundemeisjes.nl/20100507/wiskundedidactiek/

(Google translated)

See the 1st and 3rd comment.

While basic skills are necessary, who cares if my students can factor trinomials if they don’t know how much to tip a waiter without an app? I have Algebra II students who can not compare cell phone plans, but can simplify radicals with the best of them.

I am a math person so I am always first to run to the appropriate equation and solve it showing all of my steps, but I am often humbled when a student suggests a quicker method that often involves critical thinking and did not require the creation of a variable named x. This is what I want to foster in my students. I will be successful in my classroom when my students can think through a problem and share possible solutions, even if they didn’t do it like the sample problem in the text. Our classrooms must be a balance of skills and relevant problems that necessitate those skills. Please continue with your plight in math education. There are many of us out there who appreciate and even rely on your work to inspire us.

It’s not news that there are educational conservatives in mathematics all over the world. The English and Australians have them and no translator is needed. Israel is fairly rife with them. I’ve found them in Holland, too. I have little doubt they are universal and that like the poor, they will always be among us.

The difference for me is that I don’t blame poor people for their circumstances unless I have a lot of evidence that a given individual is utterly responsible for his/her own sorry state. With educational conservatives facing innovative ideas, it’s hard not to blame them for their head-in-the-sand, hold-back-the-ocean-with-a-broom attitudes, however. To quote a variation that frequently appears on math-teach, a list I finally left after about 15 years of arguing with such people because the list-moderator and list owners had clearly changed the rules in ways that overly-favored their own worst enemies (can you say, “Liberals love to shoot themselves in the feet and then wonder why they limp”?), “There’s nothing that’s good that’s new and nothing new that’s good.” This is said in relation to math teaching, teaching, and much else. And Dan’s work is a constant thorn in the side of people with that viewpoint.

Long my he wave.

Just posted this on KTM:

It can’t be easy to find this many wrong-headed people (though a few with their blinders off), though I should remember this is “Math Wars” and ‘math warrior’ turf and not be quite so surprised. SteveH appears to be the blindest of the bunch, not able to get anything right about what Dan Meyer is saying even in a short 12 minute talk.

Mr. Meyer is likely one of the more interesting people teaching K-12 math out there, and while no one, least of all Mr. Meyer, is calling out “Dan, Dan, Be Like Him,” he certainly is offering lots of ideas worth thinking about. It looks like, however, thinking about things without having to judge them instantly in “Math Warrior-Speak” is not the long suit of some folks. Nothing new there, but always so sad when a really interesting person like Dan Meyer comes along.

Nothing Dan does or talks about is offered as a panacea. Nor is he ever suggesting that any particular thing he does or talks about is even something he has “perfected” (as if that were ever really possible to begin with, outside the weird imaginations of, well, self-appointed math warriors and their dupes).

What he does show is that we need not settle for business as usual, need not pretend that new technology doesn’t exist or can’t be applied to teaching, that old technology and resources and everyday objects can be used in remarkably innovative ways to make things INTERESTING (perish the thought, eh, math warriors?) and that in general there are many more ways through the woods than one.

This is terribly threatening to people who want to keep everyone firmly rooted in about the 13th century, give or take. Luckily for most of us, Dan Meyer and others like him really don’t give a fig for all the nay-saying. As someone pointed out on his blog today, the perfect image for SteveH, as well as many more nationally-known math warriors like Wayne Bishop, James Milgram, and David Klein, is Dana Carvey’s character on SNL, “The Grumpy Old Man. Doesn’t matter if you’re old or young, male or female: anyone can be a grumpy old man, and we’ve got some beauts in the comments above. Holding back the sea with a broom, are ya? Lots of luck with that.

Good teaching is hard. I appreciate you working on it, and sharing your process with us. (As do so many of these commenters so far!)

Please keep doing so. I guess the good side of being noticed is that it means you’re being read, which is good reason to keep writing. Or videoing.

Dan-

The people who comment at KTM strike me as being genuinely concerned about kids’ mathematical knowledge, and yet so indescribably burned by something bad that happened either to them or to their kids by way of modern pedagogy that their concern has mostly sublimated into shrillness and alarm-sounding. It’s like the voices of people who once would have said, “Math education needs fixing; what can we do to make it better?” and now can only say, “Math worked for me and let’s hunt down the people who do it differently”.

I think your time is better spent on continuing to care about kids, how they learn math, and how best to prepare them for college and the real world — as you are already doing — than to engage in the math wars with people who are verifiably not interested in changing their minds about anything.

The other Dan @4: Please reconsider the remark about home-schooling parents. The homeschooled students I get in my college math classes are far and away better prepared in math than the other young men and women. So these homeschooling parents must be doing something right, and I don’t think there’s any evidence that KTM is representative of the entire homeschooling community.

Sam, I didn’t have quite the same grad school experience, but otherwise that’s exactly what I thought. It seemed like mudslinging because they felt threatened.

I see it in our faculty meetings or professional development meetings all the time: “What are they going to force on us now?” Everyone goes in to these things very defensive and worried about how we’re going to be forced to change, so they try to pick at something in the hopes that it’ll go away.

Change is hard.

Well Dan, the one thing they all seemed to agree on was the problem started with K-8 math, so let me take that burden off your shoulders, it’s all my fault, lol.

Don’t let the haters get you down!

I got a 92% in my Grade 12 Algebra class, and I teach science (which requires a passing knowledge of math), but damned if I can remember a single thing I learned. I know there was something on quadratic equations, but I can’t even remember what the formula is nowadays. My science students find it moderately humourous that I can’t help them with their math homework, and they’re fairly scandalized when I tell them that very little of what they’re learning (Grade 10 & 11) will actually be useful to them outside of school.

By contrast, I remember well many individual lessons of my quirky Gr 10 science teacher, because he always tried to get us to make some connection between what we were doing and the real world.

Keep doin’ what you’re doin’, and let the response of the students be all the accolades you need.

@paul thomas It doesn’t help the Constructivist cause that there are many amazing idiots promoting it. Where I got my Masters the Science Education Department were all the worst kind, claiming that you couldn’t teach anything by direct instruction. How where they teaching it? Why lecture of course. When I asked “Are my Physics students supposed to make all of the discoveries from Galileo to Einstein with just some prodding in the right direction?” and got the answer “Yes”… just “Yes” I lost what little respect I had for them. I use exploration, directed inquiry, an projects, but people like them give the whole paradigm a black eye. (Whole Language is a good idea too, but not taken to the extremes that it was)

The traditional math curriculum and standards do make it difficult to teach connections. I’d disagree on the Geometry bits though…those are all easy to make connections and use, that’s its nature (Geo=Earth, Metry=Measurement, it’s all applied mathematics of measuring) I was given an evaluation copy of what looks to be a wonderful book called _Fundamentals of Algebraic Modeling” by Timmons, Johnson, and McCook. I had to tell the math department that it looks like a great book, and I have no idea how we could use it with our curriculum, so it’s now just on my reference shelf.

“The homeschooled students I get in my college math classes are far and away better prepared in math than the other young men and women.”

Interesting point, Talbert. Why do you think this might be?

What I hear from the many college and university-level math professors I’ve talked to is that their best-prepared students were educated under the Russian, Continental European, and East Asian math systems, which use standardized curricula that have more in common with one another (e.g., the Japanese system compared to the French system) than the myriad of curricula used in the U.S. have amongst themselves (e.g., Saxon compared to Chicago Math).

Might there be something useful to conclude from this?

Katharine Beals

I used a few of your ideas from the video and elsewhere at my all-day workshop with Detroit h.s. math teachers last Thursday, some of whom had watched the video when I sent it to them. Lots of agreement, lots of rewarding recognition of the wisdom of “Be Less Helpful,” and then trying to figure out how to come to grips with kids who do NO homework EVER, are as likely as not to fall asleep, start singing, or otherwise be way off task seemingly regardless of what is being put forth for them to do or how it’s being offered.

Of course, that’s not QUITE true in that there is a limit to what has been tried and it’s hard to ignore the contexts in which even the most interesting things tried are placed. Hard to engage students who don’t have any notion of how to listen, speak accountably about mathematics, or a host of other relevant and necessary skills that aren’t strictly academic in nature.

My teachers are frustrated, but they are (mostly) thinking and listening. My job in part is to keep them from feeling so beaten down from above and below that they give up. Most are still open, when they have five minutes to reflect. Part of what I’ll need to figure out is how to buy them more time to do that.

As for informed criticism of your ideas? Haven’t seen any. We in Detroit are seeing the need to take problems and strip them down, then figure out how to scaffold them appropriately as we address mainstreaming and differentiated instruction. Every kid is different. Finding powerful, important problems and then toying with them so as to truly give multiple entry points and doing just enough and no more for each student is enormously challenging and time-consuming. Not sure if you have taught classes with such a high percentage of ‘special needs’ students, kids who are in high school operating on average at about a fourth to fifth grade level of mathematical knowledge (if that), or the kinds of inner city culture that informs Detroit schools, one in which the undercurrent of VERBAL violence is one of the most debilitating challenges teachers and students alike must deal with all the time. But I think my teachers are wise enough to see that just stand up and flapping their gums at kids isn’t the way to go. They’re trying to make decent use of the resources and technology they have, to acquire more and better, and to figure out how to be more effective regardless. Perhaps it’s time to bring WCYDWT to the inner city.

My two cents, Dan, as maybe one of the KTM “pedants” : ) Well, maybe one cent.

The substance of my talk concerned two propositions, that mathematical applications are important and that we present them poorly to students.

I agree.

If anyone has taken a hatchet to either one of those (as opposed to something I didn’t say) I’d love to hear about and learn from that discussion.

Wouldn’t you think that the authors and editors of (and teachers who successfully used) the textbook problems you display in that talk might have something to say about their “poor” presentation of “mathematical applications”? It’s not terribly difficult to imagine some kind of rebuttal and address it in the actual talk, is it?

Singapore Math 4Eva! Singapore Math Rulz!

Kilian: Not even Singaporeans are satisfied with Singapore Math. Why are Americans so enamored of it, I wonder? Nothing is “4Eva” and nothing “Rulz” as you put it, for everyone in every circumstance. That’s why teaching math isn’t a programmable activity.

Dan,

This videos shows the “fishbowl” process you describe: http://www.edutopia.org/math-social-activity-sel-video.

Thanks for all you are doing.

One thing I have noticed is that nearly everyone who is for the old-fashioned, rigor and repetition style of teaching is coming from a usually very anecdotal perspective of what worked for them. The trouble is, most of the people who are teaching/using math today are people who were successful under that system and it does work for SOME people. But how many adults do you know personally who have a negative feeling about math, insist they just couldn’t do it or if they could, they just thought it was tedious and boring. All except the ones who grew up to be engineers, accountants and math teachers, give or take.

If you think about the ways that our brains learn and remember things, there are different ways to make something become a long-term memory. The first is through repetition, assuming you are practicing correctly, and assuming you are disciplined enough to practice it repeatedly, you can create a neural pathway (like wagon ruts in a grassy field) for that piece of knowledge. Another way is if there is a significant emotion attached to it – like how we remember everything about where we were when a loved one died, etc. The more modalities you use to learn something (listening, writing, seeing, thinking, touching, moving, etc) the more likely you are to have it go to long-term memory.

Copy, practice, repeat is probably the least efficient and most boring way to learn something, although it can work. It’s a great way to kill motivation and take all the beauty, wonder and fun out of what should be a fascinating subject. Some kids still need this, while some kids, we know, absolutely do not and we are holding them back from reaching their full potential if we force it on them.

Teachers, in a perfect world, would have small classes and plenty of planning time to be able to meet the individual learning needs of all their students.

Arlo Guthrie taught “The Garden Song” using “The BOring Method.” (“Repeat after me. Inch by Inch. Row by Row. Gonna Make This Garden Grow.”) GOt a lot of laughs, but it worked. However, there were already all kinds of connections between the song and the real world and the lives of the people at the concert. You have to have both.
I had the same impression as Robert about the commenters — they’ve been burned. I had low expectations from the video and really cringed at the “be less helpful.” I work with adults on basic arithmetic and algebra skills, and many of them have had teachers who used that philosophy, were generous with “partial credit,” and passed students through courses without ’em knowing much of anything. Teachers can, and do, find vague ways of measuring achievement so they can tell themselves the students learned something. THe teachers who are, themselves, afraid of the math do it; teachers who are skillful in math do it, too, convincing themselves that the student really did “have the concept.” I’m amazed at many of the “concepts” students have, such as that “X stands for 1, right?”
However, with that example of the ski slope problem, I saw that the “being less helpful” was a lot like what I do when students need to set up problems. (Happily, our texts *do* give ‘extra’ information) The students still had to think and talk.
I’ve been reading about The Algebra Project and a couple of other programs, and including working with “my language” and then translating that into “math language” and then translating that into symbols keeps coming up. I also identified with the thought if you’re talking math, certain students won’t talk at all – but if you’re just talking, they’ll think and talk.

@James – MJ and Tiger were both practicing something they saw as (a) valuable, (b) useful for the rest of their lives, and (c) enjoyable. I’d argue that schools have done a poor job of demonstrating how most subjects are any of those…

I don’t think rational people who have nothing better to do with their time, than explore the nuances of building math curriculum should be referred to as ‘crazies.’ I have observed nothing in the news, other than what the publisher’s could come up with, that ever described student math achievement going up (although I know by now that it can’t go down any further, why am I not cheering) and I’ve been in this business for too long to not understand what’s actually been happenning. When educational research? overlooks some obvious facts, then I am disappointed and so are many others. The New Math Standard will in time be called the Obama Standard and then we can all hunt for an eighth grader that can add two numbers correctly together. Have a nice day gents.