Battle Brewing Over Utah Math Standards
None by Eric Ray
Legislation May Be On The Way
(KCPW News) Several Utah lawmakers say the state's math standards are lacking, and they want some changes. This comes after the state school board recently completed a comprehensive review and upgrade of core requirements.The school board's committee was made up of experts including mathematicians and math educators. Senator Howard Stephenson says many of the school board's committee members already believed the state's standards were fine. He says the new core consists of only "minor tweaking."
Diana Suddreth, a Secondary Mathematics Specialist for the Utah State Office of Education, says she believes the changes will significantly improve math education.
Stephenson says he wants the state school board to explain why they decided to implement the changes to the legislative committee in September. Listen to a conversation about Utah's math curriculum by downloading a podcast of today's Midday Metro.
Email to a friendPosted in KCPW Newsroom. Copyright 2008 KCPW
1. RB said:
I missed this @ can't find more on this site. I care alot about this. I've been overseas as a child in late 60's @ they we're about two yrs ahead. Subsequently in late 70's hadn't changed (even with the good efforts of the 70's- best to date). NY @ Ca have far superior pgms. The "Mathcounts" competion with their resources @ enrichment classes seams like progress. To me, math talent follows a Bell curve @ Ut. has been missing it for generations. (Small countries don't.) We teach to the middle @ don't enrich the precocious (bypassing them). Unless, their parents are engigeers or mathematicians. Ut. has lagged for the 40 yrs I've known it. 80's+ retracted the 70's effort. I do hope someone addresses this! I thought the Ch9 Math101 (UVCC was it?) was a very good class. But, to me, that's late in developement (age-wise). I'm not competent to judge colleges.
3. John Clay said:
I am currently a teacher at Glendale Middle School in the Salt Lake District. For the past 6 years I have taught English in China and Vietnam during the summer. I have had a chance to observe math education first hand in both of those countries. My wife was a Fulbright exchange teacher to Japan a few years ago. I have met friends in Asia from Singapore. I also have had classes from or professional relations with many of the people on the committee to develop the new state Core Curriculum for math.
I feel two things bothered me about the discussion on NPR. The first was a statement from Howard Stevenson that we want world class standards like Singapore and Japan. I feel this statement was made without a clear understanding of the standards and teaching styles in these two countries. The Japanese are currently undergoing a process of revamping their education system to make their students more creative and using the USA as a model in some cases as reported by my wife from meetings with the Japanese Ministry of Education. The systems are quite different in Asia and to compare them with our system may not be fair.
The second statement was by Oak Norton. He stated that using our NAPE scores as a tool to compare is not fair because of our homogeneous population. I teach in a school hat is only 20% Caucasian. We are working hard to increase the rigor of our math curriculum. It takes more than state core standards to make a good program. I also teach “Connected Math” which is the extension of investigations to middle school. The program showed good results for my students last year with a high pass rate on CRT’s. I modify the program to encourage more computation but the program is very effective, provides a good problem set, a good scope and sequence and all the tools to make a good curriculum for all students in my opinion. I do not agree with the comments abut Investigations as being a bad tool and would like to point out it is a tool.
2. Raymond Takashi Swenson said:
I earned a mathematics degree at the University of Utah after skipping my senior year of high school because I had exhausted the math curriculum and needed to go on to a full bore study of calculus. I love mathematics.
Nevertheless, I think including geometry in its traditional place in the middle of the typical mathematics sequence is a mistake. There is nothing useful in classical geometry that cannot be learned more efficiently in analytical geometry. Many people are simply not cut out for the kind of deductive reasoning that is required to do classical geometry as a process of picking axioms and assembling them using deduction to achieve a tight proof of an intuitive hypothesis. They end up simply following the deductive proofs presented to them and flush it out after the test. For those with more mathematical talent, the realization that they are simply repeating processes that are thousands of years old and not discovering anything really new, and are not practicing a skill that will be of real use to them in further mathematical explorations, is frustrating. Placing geometry right after the first year of algebra not only leads to forgetting what students learned in algebra, rather than reinforcing it, but also acts as a disincentive to further mathematical learning, since geometry is only attractive to people who enjoy the "game" aspect of it rather than to anyone who is interested in learning anything of practical value.
Classical geometry should be taken out of the secondary school curriculum entirely, and the sequence reformed to simply algebra, algebra with multiple variables, analytic geometry (which would include all the practical aspects of trigonometry), and then calculus, or statistics and probability, or linear algebra.
Forcing students to learn classical geometry that is hardly different from what was taught by Pythagoras is like forcing them to study the philosophy of Pythagoras, Socrates, and Aristotle. It is an object of interest in the history of mathematics and science, but it has little practical value and actually obscures the real practicality and ability that mathematics can confer.