Friday, April 10, 2009

Math Article in the SF Chronicle
Math Performance Anxiety

Always a treat to read the comments in the online News Paper versions.

The following comment got 8 thumbs up and 14 thumbs down:

No Child Left Behind, and its excessive testing, was a direct result of the Whole Language and fuzzy math movements. You can also throw in the self esteem movement as well. All of those movements allowed teachers to ignore, or put on the back burner, standards of what students need to know. The new standards made failure an ugly thing to look at. No longer could things be covered up with eduspeak. With the change in Washington, we will now hear for calls of alternative assessments etc. This will allow a return to the previous situation of covering up problems in education. Self esteem will again take precedence. I don't know anything, and I feel good about it. The pendulum is swinging again. Knowledge will again take a back seat to social and human services in education.

It accompanied this article on Math Performance Anxiety:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/09/EDSA16UGPU.DTL

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very strange title for an editorial about the Palo Alto adoption.

"Partial-sums addition" tells students to add 6,802 + 453 by adding 6,000 and 1,200 (which is 800+400) + 50 + 5. Why? Because: "One way is not better than another."