Reflection On Battleground Schools

            The “Dichotomies Underlying Difference Stances in Mathematics Education” chart interested me a lot. I think both of sides are important, and I do not think that math teaching is either conservative or progressive. Even though understanding, sense-making, and exploratory are significant, fluency, absorbing and applying facts are also crucial. A student is not expected to do multiplication or division effectively if he or she is not able to memorize multiplication chart fluently. Also, some of the math concepts required by other subjects may be too hard for the students to understand at their current level, so the only way will be to present the topic and have them understand latter in advanced math courses.
Another point that stopped me is that “rather than trying to cover a larger number of mathematical topics in a given time, Dewey advocated the development of high quality mental processes and a scientific attitude”. My inquiry topic is on how to foster mathematical thinking in the classroom, and all the methods take lots of time and efforts. Concepts taught through inquiry may take twice or more as much time as taught traditionally. Math is the foundation of some topics in other science courses, and the teachers from other subjects usually assume that their students already understand the math concepts. Therefore, math teachers need to make sure that the concepts are well covered for other subjects. I think the development of high quality mental processes and a scientific attitude is really important for students, but the question is how to balance them and the topics that needs to be covered.

            The third point is that the “eighth-grade students ranked 28th in the world in mathematics, well behind countries whose economies were also growing at unprecedented rates”. I did my grade 8 math in China, and it was so much harder than the same grade level in Canada. Comparing the levels between students who already know a lot with the ones who have not learned all the topics is not reasonable. Also, because of the difference in language, translation and so on, the difficulty may also vary across countries. I am not sure whether it is fair to use this as an evidence to support progressive stance.

Comments

  1. Susan Gerofsky16 October 2017 at 11:32

    Very interesting discussion, Yijia. Some of the big themes in math education controversies come out here: fluency and understanding, 'covering' vs. 'uncovering' the curriculum and international comparisons and their effects.

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