Summary and Response to Battleground Schools

This article is about the three main movements in mathematics education in North America for the twentieth-century. The first movement was Progressivist reform (circa 1910-1940). It changed from “inculcation of meaningless memorized procedures” to “split between knowing and doing, or abstract and applied knowledge, proposing that students must engage in doing math as part of a reflective inquiry if they were to increase their intelligence and gain knowledge develop scientific and democratic thinkers.” Students were given the “challenge of doing and experimentation in math, accompanied by the sense-making activities of reflective practice” rather then “rigidly obedient rule-followers.” The second movement was the New Math reform of the 1960s. After USSR was beating the US in the space race, they changed the math curriculum for K-12, mainly focus on highly abstract math concepts. They wanted to familiarize students with the math basis for future careers as scientists, but many teachers had little knowledge with the new math topics, and they didn’t understand why new ways were being introduced. Therefore, many teachers, parents against the New Math since it trained students to be future scientist but not realize not all of them what to pursue that career. The third movement was the NCTM Standards-based Math Wars, from the 1990s to the present. This is a back-to-basics curriculum. They emphasized the development of flexible problem-solving skills and valued deep understanding and an ability to make math connections above calculation skills, although fluency in calculation was still considered an important goal.

In my opinion, I doubt that the reason for students in Asian countries have higher ranked in the world is because they have deeper conceptual understanding of mathematics. This is because I heard most of my Asian friends said they learned mathematic almost one hundred percent instrumentally before they came. Also, author said most people have negative attitude toward math. The reason might be that we didn’t have good math teacher at elementary school so seldom students understand the concepts, and students started to dislike math. Therefore, I think we definitely should have math specialized teacher at the elementary school.