Re: How to End the Math Wars

>To me, the TIME piece is mostly nonsense, non-reporting of a very
>deep and serious issue.
>The only decent part is the correctly bleak forecast if the back-to-
>basics folks are allowed to control math the same way the phonics
>phacists got control of reading.
>
>Other than that, the piece takes the usual idiotic "neutral" stance,
>as if each side here were equally wild and extreme, as if at least a
>sizable proportion of the anti-reform rhetoric were true, and as if
>this were a case where neither side has much idea of what it is
>doing, despite the research evidence that suggests strongly that back
>to basics is a sham and a failed disgrace, regardless of Jim Milgram.
>
>Personally, the Jim Milgrams of this country have nothing important
>to say about K12 mathematics teaching and learning. They don't
>understand the first thing about education, about kids, about what
>really goes on in elementary classrooms regarding math, nor do they
>really care. They are incapable of or unwilling to attempt to step
>outside their own lofty experience of mathematics in order to see
>where the rubber meets the road at every grade level from K to 12.
>Their goals are perverted by their own high level of mathematical
>achievement to such an extent that it is impossible for them to see
>what a child or young adolescent struggles to understand and why. Nor
>do they have a clue about how to teach anyone mathematics who is not
>cut from the same or very similar cloth as are they. Letting such
>people bully teachers and students into a narrow vision of what's
>possible and what's necessary in K-12 mathematics classrooms would be
>an enormous error, one we cannot allow to continue. I hope that NCSM
>and NCTM will speak out with courage against the bizarre twisting of
>the truth, including the distortion of the purpose and content of the
>Curricular Focal Points, and to force the media to start telling the
>truth about the Math Wars. This lame piece of fluff doesn't even
>begin to steer towards an exit strategy, though the catchy headline
>will no doubt get it read far more widely than it deserves.