New Report Urges Return to Basics In Teaching Math

I missed this article on the front page of the WSJ a week and a half ago.  Thank goodness this dopey math (that's what I call it) is going the way of the dodo bird:

The nation's math teachers, on the front lines of a 17-year curriculum war, are getting some new marching orders: Make sure students learn the basics.

In a report to be released today, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents 100,000 educators from prekindergarten through college, will give ammunition to traditionalists who believe schools should focus heavily and early on teaching such fundamentals as multiplication tables and long division.

It's truly astonishing that people who said nonsense like this weren't laughed out of the room:

Understanding math, rather than parroting answers to poorly understood equations, was the goal of the council's controversial 1989 standards. Those guidelines called on teachers to promote estimation, rather than precise answers. For example, an elementary-school student tackling the problem 4,783 divided by 13 should instead divide 4,800 by 12 to arrive at "about 400," the 1989 report said. The council said this approach would enable children using calculators to "decide whether the correct keys were pressed and whether the calculator result is reasonable."

"The calculator renders obsolete much of the complex pencil-and-paper proficiency traditionally emphasized in mathematics courses," the council said then.

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Arithmetic Problem
New Report Urges Return to Basics In Teaching Math

Critics of 'Fuzzy' Methods
Cheer Educators' Findings;
Drills Without Calculators

Taking Cues From Singapore

By JOHN HECHINGER
September 12, 2006; Page A1

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115802278519360136-search.html