Christopher Green wrote: "There are always a few great teachers. Employing the methods they employ won't necessarily work with the vast masses of teachers hired in public schools across the nation (and the world). What is needed are tried and true methods that will work well with the whole spectrum of teachers (and students)."
Nothing works for everyone (especially "vast masses" of humanity) thus the concept of academic freedom. However, if there ever was academic freedom at the elementary and secondary levels, it is certainly totally obliterated now with prescribed curricula, federal mandates, state benchmark testing, etc. I'm not sure yet, based on the Intelligent Design metaphor invoked in the original post on this thread, who are the fundamentalists and who are the progressives on the issue of constructivist math. Christopher also wrote: "The constructivist method seems to be failing badly in the school district featured in the article, even with students whose parrents are mathematically sophisticated. That's got to be a bad sign for virtually everywhere else." Where was the evidence that it was "failing badly"? It didn't even seem to be failing given the test scores, etc. After 12 paragraphs of anecdotes about how bad it was, there were these two paragraphs of actual data: "Not surprising, school officials here paint a wildly different picture of the new math curriculum than do the critical parents. They point to a slip in Penfield's scores on standardized math tests and Regents exams in the late 1990's as a catalyst for changing the program. They also note that since the introduction of the constructivist curriculums - Investigations for elementary school, Connected Math for junior high, Core Plus for high school - those scores have risen gradually but steadily. In a broad sense, Penfield can be a hard place to make the indictment against constructivism stick. The high school sends 90 percent of its graduates to two-year or four-year colleges, and the mean SAT score stands at 1117 (with 562 on math). In the battle of anecdotes, school officials assembled their own array of parents to praise the new curriculum when this columnist visited Penfield last week." Notice how the author subtly criticizes the school district for engaging in a battle of anecdotes when all the other side has is anecdotes and how it is "not surprising" that the school district would have an opposing view. I guess, "in a broad sense" is synonymous with "based on empirical data instead of anecdotes". As to the war of anecdotes, at least the school district had some empirical ammunition. And as to "failing badly" I would love for my kids to be in a school that was failing that badly. As to the validity of the parents' reactions, there is something to be said for the argument given by the school district that they live in a community with a lot of math experts, made up of people who succeeded under the old method, who are going to complain about any change to the system under which they succeeded. This doesn't mean that a change in methods might not be more effective for a larger number of students than the old method. (This is similar to us, as professors, believing that all students should learn like we did as undergraduates). The subgroup that does really well under the old system becomes the teachers of the new generation. Rick Dr. Rick Froman Professor of Psychology John Brown University 2000 W. University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (479) 524-7295 http://www.jbu.edu/academics/sbs/faculty/rfroman.asp --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
