Kicking off Project Ed 365

This is the launch of a 365-day project in blogging around issues in educational policy and reform. The objective from a personal standpoint is to increase my own immersion in the educational debate and to track my own reactions to that debate. Each day I will read an article, post it or a piece of it, and/or share the link to the article and a brief response to the content and comments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/education/01math.html?_r=1

The first article I have chosen is from NY Times Education news, about “Singapore Math,” a reform in mathematics education based – you guessed it – upon the method of teaching math in Singapore. As a former student at a Science & Tech magnet and math teacher at the middle school level (although only trained and certified in science, but that is a whole different topic) I know that quality math education is very hard to come by. I basically taught myself BC Calculus because my calc teacher was sub-par at best. For that matter, my Algebra II/Trig teacher and Pre-Calculus teachers were not particularly diligent or competent either. As a teacher, I did my best with my students, but felt very much constrained by the amount of material to be covered and the wildly divergent strengths my students brought to the classroom.

One of the commentators mentions that in Singapore Math, the progression in instruction moves from concrete to pictorial to abstract and that American math curricula often skip the middle step. I found that very interesting, as the problem I faced and still sometimes face on a much more complex level as a learner and the problem I encountered with my students was almost always in the leap from concrete to abstract. That and of course the amount of time one has to “master”any topic.

Bringing it back to policy, which I intend always to do, the national outcry over American students’ lag in math understanding really requires in-depth investigation rather than jumping from fad to fad. I believe that every educator would recommend paring down the curriculum and focusing on: 1.) higher-order skills rather than memorization; 2.) application to real-world situations and 3.) greater attention to individual learning styles and paces. The real question is how to accomplish that on a widespread basis.