When Teachers Teach Teaching

A well-deserved slam of fuzzy math and our nation's pathetic schools of education:

Going under the banner of "reform math"— known popularly as "fuzzy math" — these instructional methods ignored drills and memorization in favor of allowing students maximum room for "self-expression" in the development of "problem-solving strategies." Our precious ignoramuses thus drew pictures, made up stories, and sometimes even graded themselves.

Unfortunately, grade-school math isn't a form of "self-expression," and you can't help but wonder how such an approach ever became fashionable. The council doesn't venture a guess, and I think I know why.

There's a dirty little secret behind fuzzy math. The technique didn't become popular just because it supposedly made math easier to learn. It became popular because it made math easier to teach.

Indeed, a teacher didn't have to know much of anything to guide students blindly though a fuzzy math curriculum.

Thus the council's paper, welcome as it was declined to reach the deeper conclusion about the crisis in math education: The problem lies not only with how students are taught mathematics, but how teachers of mathematics are taught teaching.

There's something rotten in the country's 1,200 education schools, where the vast majority of the nation's primary and secondary teachers of math and other subjects get their training and degrees. To paraphrase Woody Allen, "Those that can't do, teach. Those that can't teach, teach education."

That's the conclusion — more gently formulated, of course — of the second notable report this fall, and the much braver of the two.

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When Teachers Teach Teaching

BY ANDREW FERGUSON
December 13, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/45093

As it usually does, the fall season brought another shower of blue-ribbon reports about the sorry state of American education. You could hear the cluck-clucking and tut-tutting from one coast to the other.