Word: mathe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fear of Math. Factory is the idea of Jerrold Zacharias, professor emeritus of physics at M.I.T. and the inventor of civilization's most precise timepiece: the atomic clock. Zacharias has long been concerned about what he calls "mathophobia," a widespread fear of math among school children, especially minority students. Black children, according to a 1975 report by the Education Commission of the States, score 14% below the national norm on math tests at age 9, 21% below...
Determined to make math less formidable, Zacharias in 1974 assembled a team of educators at the Educational Development Center in Newton, Mass. With the help of a $4 million grant from the U.S. Office of Education, the group created a series of 65 TV programs aimed at eight- to eleven-year-olds-the age at which interest in math first begins to wane. Zacharias and his co-workers isolated five mathematical concepts rarely mastered by that age group: map making and scaling, estimating, measurement, decimals and graphs. Then the team planned Factory episodes that focus on each of these problem...
...Sesame Street, in neighborhood settings. Because black and Hispanic children are a special concern, many of the shows are filmed in black areas or in the barrio. For example, at "Julio's Panaderia," a bakery in East Los Angeles, a Chicano family solves everyday problems with math. Coolidge Cool Breeze, a disc jockey on Factory, is a character designed to appeal to blacks. Dialing a number, Cool Breeze croons: "Might this be the home of Olive Crabtree? Can you tell me for one hundred big smackers what the answer is to eight times nine?" Olive is stumped. Viewers, however...
...like that for two weeks. He was sleeping 18 hours a day. Every time he woke up, he started to study his math. Every time he studied his math, he fell back asleep. He figured something was wrong and went to UHS for mono tests...
After a while, he decided to switch and study for his Philosophy exam, and all of a sudden he found he could study 14 hours straight, without getting tired at all. It was amazing. He wrote his math section man asking for an excuse from the exam, but the section man said you had to have a UHS excuse and the freshman knew he had no specific disease, so there was nothing he could...