>Bill wrote:
>> Math is under attack for the same reasons as grammar: that it is taught in
>> isolation and it is boring, etc.
>>
>> It's under attack because so many students fail to learn it. Just check
>out
>> the math scores. They are generally terrible, except among those with an
>> aptitude for math.
>>
>> As for students' ability to count small change, you have only to notice
>> that cash registers now do all the figuring for cashiers--yet many
>cashiers
>> still have trouble counting the change to you.
>>
>> So it comes about that, as with grammar, there is now an effort to reform
>> the teaching of math. The main proposal is that teach math in context and
>> in practical situations.
>>
>> Bill
>
>Bill, (growl!) how on
>earth does anyone ever manage to teach
>`out of context'? It seems to me that we
>never can lack a context. So what is the point
>of striving towards teaching `in context'?
>Sophie

What I mean--and I think others mean as well--is teaching without a
connection to the everyday world of the students. Thus if you teach only
that 3 + 4 = 7, that is teaching out of context. And of course elementary
teachers know better than to do such a thing, so they have students add
pennies or apples, etc.

Yet have you ever heard a teacher provide a meaningful context for dividing
fractions? Why, for heavens sake, must we invert and multiply? And how will
I ever remember to do it if I don't know why I should?

And let us not even contemplate negative numbers. My stomach hurts at the
very thought.

Moreover, the higher we go in math, the more difficult it is to provide a
meaningful context--the so-called "story problems" notwithstanding. (I
don't think that having one train start west from New York at 50 mph,
another east from Chicago at 60 mph and asking students to calculate where
they will meet is providing a meaningful context.) And one suspects that
those teaching math had little need for context anyway.

Here's a quote for you:

"We know that many students are bored to death and frustrated to tears when
faced with "exercises numer 1-29 (odd) on page 253." Compare the energy and
enthusiasm of a class cooperatively learning statistics with bags of M&M's
to a class mindlessly and individually inverting and multiplying
meaningless fractions to arrive at equally meaningless answers. Compare a
class where students are estimating costs for a shopping spree from
newspaper fliers prior to using calculators to see who comes closest to
$100, and a class tediously finding sums of columns of context-free
numbers."

Steven Leinwand, "It's Time to Abandon Computational Algorithms," Education
Week, 2-9-94, p. 36.

How does this apply to grammar? English teachers often use the same
procedures that math teachers use--requiring students to memorize rules
that they never understood, working with sentences taken out of context,
assigning endless drills of inserting the correct version of its/it's or
diagramming sentences.

As with math instruction, we need a better way.

Bill

William J. McCleary
3247 Bronson Hill Road
Livonia, NY 14487
716-346-6859

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