Word: mathes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...true" by filling in the blank. As 40 schoolteachers from as far away as Florida and Alaska looked on, the students excitedly gave Mathematician Max Beber-man their answer: the sentence is already true because anything times zero equals zero. What the teachers saw were ninth-graders discovering a math principle entirely by themselves. This approach is so important to Beberman that he may not even tell new students the name of his subject. It is algebra, taught in a way that U.S. mathematicians consider the freshest reform in nearly a century...
Child's Language. As Beberman sees it, conventional high-school math "turns out rigid little computers with a limited range of programs." Often detesting the subject, teachers view it as such a painful manipulation of inscrutable symbols that they miss the underlying concepts. They either teach it mechanically or try to liven it up with "interesting" problems, e.g., computing interest. Such teaching is completely alien to the child's mind, says Beberman. "Children are not miniature adults. They have a thirst for the abstract and the world of fancy." They may even grasp math relationships faster than reading...
...bigger child-labor pool, and makes sure that everyone has a state-approved specialty. For youngsters permitted to study fulltime beyond the eighth grade, the ten-year school system is being lengthened to eleven years with the bulk of the gain in vocational training (1,454 hours), science and math (a total of 395 more hours). As for humanities, says Expert DeWitt, "the ax will fall." There is little room for humanities in managing an industrial state...
...Schoolteachers already number 1,800,000 (v. 1,500,000 in the U.S.), half of them in secondary schools, where 340,000 specialize in science and math. This year the U.S. produced 13,000 graduates prepared to teach high school science and math; the Russians produced...
...Colorado in Boulder to put some life into the study of living things by revising the high school curriculum from amoeba to zygote. With an initial $738,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, which has already spent more than $8,000,000 to upgrade high school physics, math and chemistry, the biologists have no illusions about producing high schools full of biology majors. But they do hope to increase the percentage considerably, and at the very least give every youngster a good idea of what the science is all about. Says Dr. Arnold Grobman, director of the Colorado project...