Word: mathe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...imagine the conceivable Mysteries, the Persephone complex, hysteria, male envy of females, creativity, the cult of Dionysos, the effect of alcohol on fantasy, involvement in reality, and mental health? Does any of this help explain why Rudy Kats has found that college males whose verbal-math SAT scores differ by more than 100 points drink much more heavily than thoses whose scores differ less...
...current confusion and frustration in new-math teaching do not stem from any lack of Popsicle sticks. The heart of the matter, as James Gates, executive secretary of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, points out, is that most of the nation's 1,600,000 elementary-school teachers are insufficiently trained to teach math -either new or old. Many teachers who spend a fifth of their workday on math have not taken any math courses themselves since the ninth grade...
...hazard in teaching new math is that its basic concepts-sets, number systems not based on ten, lattices-require profound comprehension by teachers, which usually entails plenty of upgrading study. Professor Robert Wirtz, an associate of Beberman's at the University of Illinois, visited more than 100 elementary schools all over the U.S. and reported: "The teachers I found are frightened. They don't understand the new math or why they are supposed to teach...
...ways to overcome it. A Detroit official says the trick is to go slow: "We began five years ago with only twelve schools and a handful of teachers, and have no target date for all our 225 elementary schools." Now 78 of Detroit's schools teach new math in Grades 4, 5 and 6. Of the 3,500 teachers in the system, 700 have attended new-math seminars and courses on Saturdays, encouraged by $15-a-day payments. Aggravating the shortage of new-math teachers is the fact that not enough new-math courses are offered at universities...
Beberman says: "The old system was deadly-drill, drill, drill. What I'd like to do is take all these people who say, 'Let's have new math, let's get it into the schools,' and shake them up and say, 'First let's make sure the teachers who are going to teach it know what's going on.'" Badly taught, new math plants confused concepts and creates individuals who cannot even keep their check stubs figured, and Beberman never intended that. "The key thing is computation," he says...