However, the sense of control and professional input that we gained was immense, even if the results were bureaucratically over-ridden later on.

And I have heard a bit about reading. It is often the same people arguing whole language vs phonics as argue traditional vs. constructivist math.

Jonathan

I think teachers tend to know how to avoid the extremes and the politics — their focus is on real teaching, not theory. That’s the problem with the Kleinists. They say their programs are balanced, but the teachers I speak to (and my own experience as a high school English teacher) tell me they are not. Teachers find themselves compelled to enact someone else’s theoretical and political agenda, in programs that lean too heavily to constructivism in math and whole language in English. In reading, writing, and math in the elementary schools either you teach the Klein way, or, well, you teach the Klein way. Curriculum is de-emphasized, and pedagogy is not permitted to grow intrinsically from the content .Then in high school we are left to pick up the pieces.

You were lucky to be able to have that kind of collaboration in your district, and that sounds like the heart and soul of what unions and DR’s ought to do with their members. Six years ago sounds pre Klein. Was it?

Our District Rep at the time, Dave Schulman, organized a committee of us to file a district-wide request for professional conciliation under Article 24 of our contract.

About two dozen teachers met on and off over the course of a year to prepare. There were maybe five or six core teachers, and I was one of them.

We did good work. We had our hearing with the Supe and his deputy present. And we won.

Why mention this now? Because along the way our core group became very familiar with other, national aspects of the Math Wars. And part of that education was being exposed to what I would characterize as extremists: those who were using mathematics as a political battleground. As a group, we were not comfortable with either side.

Here’s part of what I wrote to Dave, on the evening before our hearing: “Let’s start with the “Math Wars.” It makes me damned nervous to be on the same side as what I would call right-wing kooks. It started as a California thing: “Back to basics” vs. “Constructivists” along roughly the same fault lines as the anti-Bilingual and the anti-Affirmative Action fights there. … I like to think of us as taking the reasonable center against the Ed nuts on one side, but then holding it against hte back to basics cretins who will certainly be emboldened enough to start making real noise…” (June 14, 2001)

NYCHOLD is very much part of that back-to-basics extreme. And as far as the CUNY math chairs being excluded, and mind you, I like these guys, but they do not even have a consistent curriculum campus to campus. They were right that Diana Lam and Joel Klein’s decisions stunk, but they did not have a better proposal, and do not; they are not pedagogues. It is easier to be a critic, which is a suitable role for them, than to actually make the curricular decisions.

Jonathan

It is the attitude in this country that is a problem, but not the only problem.

We can look far back, and things before were not rosy either. How many students used to really “get” algebra? 60%? Geometry? 30%?

So we made lots of changes to help reach the kids who weren’t getting math, and made things worse for the kids who were. I am as nervous about the new regents as you are, but I am glad that at least the names of the exams now make sense. We need to take some steps backwards, and that is one.

At the same time, there is still the problem of reaching the kids who never got math. Just because A and B were complete disasters does not remove our obligation to teach as much math as students are able to learn, and to keep trying to increase the amount they are able to learn.

Jonathan

First, you say, “Parents and the public don’t expect excellence to occur, nor even passable skills, in sports and music without lots of practice and repetition. How can they expect less from academic subjects?”

I agree. And it seems that every rank-and-file teacher I talk to agrees with you too. In fact, when it comes to Math, they have agreed for years. And for years they have been yelling about the need for students to master the basics – from times tables to basic math algorithms – but have been derided as old-fashioned. They were forced – as they have been forced in other subjects – to teach against what they knew would be best. On the elementary level it was a different math concept everyday – five miles wide and one inch deep. In high school, every math teach I knew was skeptical about the change from the algebra-geometry-trig sequence. No one listened, and now – after ten bad years – it’s coming back.

Since no one but we teachers seem to care what teachers say – I offer you as support an article published in American Educator in Spring 2006 by Daniel Willingham, titled, How Knowledge Helps. Willingham, who is a professor of cognitive psychology, explains how important it is for students to acquire background knowledge, and shows how this applies to math as well.( http://www.nychold.com/talk-ocken-051002.doc) I am probably about to distort and simplify what Willingham says, and I suggest all our members read the article. But put simply,Willingham explains how working memory can only juggle a limited amount of discreet bits of information. To juggle more, it has to rely on chunking. Random letters, for example, are hard to remember and take up a lot of space in our short term memories; but NCLB takes up less because our familiarity/recall allows us to see them as a single unit. Willingham offers a better example.

“Consider, for example, the plight of the algebra student who has not mastered the distributive property. Every time he faces a problem with a(b + c), he must stop and plug in easy numbers to figure out whether he should write a(b) + c or a + b(c) or a(b) + a(c). The best possible outcome is that he will eventually finish the problem—but he will have taken much longer than the students who know the distributive property well (and, therefore, have chunked it as just one step in solving the problem). The more likely outcome is that his working memory will become overwhelmed and he either won’t finish the problem or he’ll get it wrong.”

So, mastery of basics has the blessings of the teachers, the cognitive scientists – and finally the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics, whose fuzzy notions about math have driven education here in NY, much to the dismay of classroom teachers. This Fall NCTM finally reversed itself (something it won’t admit), and perhaps now math teachers can all get some relief.

I agree also with your second point: there is no curriculum. As you point out, and as the UFT and AFT have pointed out, there is no clear idea of what children should know, and when they should know it. Our voices have been in line with some of NY’s top educators, which of course have been ignored. For example, Stanley Ocken of CUNY delivered a paper in October of 2005 entitled, Mathematics Education Reform: Toward a Coherent K-12 Curriculum. ( http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring06/willingham.htm) In it, he pointed out that under Harold Levy, the Board of Education and CUNY convened a Math Commission charged with setting directions for NYC K-12 math education, which resulted in the Goldstein Report. Ockem tells us:

“A principal recommendation of the resulting Goldstein Report was to focus on K-16 education in New York as a “seamless system,” with co-ordination between CUNY mathematics departments and K-12 educators. The word “seamless” was used to indicate proper alignment of mathematics requirements from elementary school through college. That was a great idea. Had it been implemented, following the California model, we could by now have been well on the way to establishing a K-16 mathematics curriculum that is both seamless and coherent……Unfortunately, that goal seems rather distant.”

Ocken goes on to tell us how he and other CUNY and NYU math scholars were shut out of the discussions about Math once Klein took over. In fact, they even sent a letter of warning about the programs Klein was adopted, but as Ocken says, “That letter never received the courtesy of a reply.” Instead Klein relied on the NCTM standards that came up short on basic math skills, in favor of concepts.

So, it is not for lack of voices that math has suffered in this country, and especially in New York. It’s for lack of ears.

Roberta M. Eisenberg:As controversies rage about the best way to teach math and whether students should be allowed to use calculators — incidentally, the State Education Department on Dec. 1 declared that calculators will now be considered teaching m…