RSSCharity »
Posts highlighting charities.
Current Events Roundup
December 6th, 2005 | No Comments
It may sound like a new age, half-baked idea; the “Back to the Basics” school of math education is cringing right now; but this teacher is exactly right that American students often have trouble seeing the connections between subjects, and in particular have trouble seeing the connections between math and anything else. The current drive towards high-stakes testing and national standards has done little to remedy this problem and has, if anything, made it worse.
Although the reform movement has started to take hold, math is still often taught as a series of disconnected and arbitrarily defined rules and procedures that students cannot ever hope to penetrate. An embarrassingly small percentage of students ever come to understand that math is a perfect, universal language with which you can try to describe all sorts of natural and social phenomena, and thus is infinitely useful, even for day-to-day living.
