Math: It should be elementary

Talk about March Madness: The National Math Panel is about to issue its big report on the state of math education in America.

OK, we know, that doesn't exactly juice the excitement meter like the Sweet 16 (although, while we're digressing, just think of how much math there is in the NCAA Tournament, what with its first round of 64, its Elite Eight and Final Four, and not until the championship round do you hit a prime number).

Still, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel report will be big for math educators.

The panel was convened by President Bush in 2006 to figure out what to do about American math education, which some regard as so bad as to constitute a national crisis. Its impending report  was the topic of a "webinar" -- an unfortunate coinage for a seminar on the Web -- held Tuesday by the New York-based Hechinger Institute, which supports journalism about education.

Francis "Skip" Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and a member of the national panel, said the report would be issued sometime in mid-March, and would focus on what American schools need to do to prepare students in elementary and middle school so that they are ready for algebra when it hits them in eighth or ninth grade.

Fennell didn't want to give away a lot of what would be in the report, but this much was clear: The report will say what many mathematicians have been saying for years. The United States needs to prepare students to compete with the rest of the world by being like much of the rest of the world.

That means far fewer topics per year in elementary math classes. (Asian and European schools tend to teach just a few topics each year but teach them well; American schools teach as many as 100.) Smaller textbooks. More "coherence." And much better teacher training.

Participants in the webinar (there's that word again) delivered some zingers. Bill Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University, said he briefed about 25 members of Congress recently on the need for a national math curriculum. Those are fighting words in some quarters, but Schmidt (who stressed "national, not federal") said the idea generated some interest. Richard Schaar, former president of the division of Texas Instruments that makes educational calculators, said the alternative to a radical improvement in math education was the wholesale flight of good jobs to other countries. As things stand, he said, the United States is in a "national security crisis" because the government can't find enough qualified U.S. citizens to fill engineering jobs that require security clearances. And Fennell, the most reserved of the three, described the current math curricula in the United States as "a mess."

One final note: The word of the day is ... fractions. The National Math Panel found that American students have a miserable grasp of fractions, and that keeps them from succeeding in higher math, Fennell said. Anyone who has sat in on a high school algebra class knows that's not a half-baked idea.

-- Mitchell Landsberg

Photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Henry Borenson, Ed.D.]

A key step to raising the level of mathematics education in the United States is to provide an opportunity for students in grades 4 to 6 to experience significant success with algebra. I say "provide" the opportunity because we already know how to accomplish this. See the article "Catch them Young" by Polly Ghazi (you can do a Google Search) where 10 year olds are solving equations such as 5x + 2= 3x + 12 and 2(x+4) = x + 10 using the Hands-On Equations program which I developed.

The program succeeds by making the abstract concepts of algebra visual and kinesthetic. In fact, learning these algebraic concepts is far EASIER for students and much more GRATIFYING to them, than many of the arithmetic skills that they spend their time with. In much of their school work in arithmetic, the students have to rely on memorized procedures. With solving algebraic equations, they can use their reasoning skills, and thus gain the notion that mathematics is something that can be understood.

If the National Math Panel focuses excessively on the need for a strong foundation in fractions as a prerequisite for algebra, they will have given the wrong impression. Algebra is not just for the elite who can master all their computation skills, and not just for 8th and 9th graders.

The focus of the Panel should be on giving all grade school and middle school students significant experience with real algebra and verbal problems (see "Verbal Problem of the Week" at www.borenson.com) PRIOR to a formal course in algebra.

Once young students are INSPIRED by their ability to succeed with algebra, they will then be motivated to put more effort into all their mathematical work.

In the Hands-On Equations Verbal Problems Workshop we show teachers how 5th graders, using the game pieces of the program, or the pictorial notation, can learn to solve this verbal problem:

"If 1/3 of a number, increased by 8, is the same as 2/3 of the number, increased by 6, find the number."

The solution is clever and does not require knowing how to work with fractional linear equations, Yet, this success leads to the desire to learn more