Word: mathes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...more he observed the goings-on in the Illinois high-school math class, the more uncomfortable the young mathematician became. At one point the teacher took up a "story" problem which involved two equations with two unknowns (10x+50y =320 and x+2=y). One boy ingeniously found a way to solve the problem with only one unknown, x+5 (x+2) = 32. But the teacher did not congratulate him: she told him he was "wrong" and sent him back to his seat. To Mathematician David Page, 31, of the University of Illinois' College of Education, this...
Since 1951 the University of Illinois has had a team working on a way to change all that. The project was launched when university authorities found engineering applicants were consistently ill-equipped mathematically, wasted months in learning basic math skills they should have learned in high school. It assigned young (then 26) Mathematician Max Beberman of the University's College of Education to show the high schools how to step up their math instruction. Beberman, later joined by Page, decided the trouble lay in the whole approach to math teaching. He junked old methods, drew up a new curriculum...
...Office of Education, the totals of high-school students taking science and mathematics have gone up 381,000 and 400,000 respectively; only solid geometry (down 9,000) lost numerical ground. But on a percentage basis, the picture was not so bright. Except for biology and trigonometry, science and math seem to be attracting a smaller and smaller proportion of high-school students...
...work was only passable, but the teacher-shy high school was delighted to have another math instructor. Fordham moved his family into a house in nearby Hamilton, and his wife Geneva, who also had credentials from Westminster, landed a job in a Hamilton elementary school. For the Fordhams, the future seemed assured-until one day they applied for a small loan at the Household Finance Corp...
...make up for the inadequacies of the secondary schools, West Point automatically runs review classes in math. Annapolis estimates that about one in seven of its incoming students needs special work. The math situation is so bad in the secondary schools, that about five years ago Annapolis abolished trigonometry as an entrance requirement, began to teach it itself...