Word: mathes
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...math time for the fifth-graders at Fernangeles Elementary School in Sun Valley, Calif., and everyone is stumped. The students have spent close to an hour puzzling over the question at hand: "What if everybody here had to shake hands with everyone else? How many handshakes would that take?" While the children, seated in small groups, debate and frown and scribble notes--and devise alternatives to the dread act of actually touching classmates of the opposite sex--their teacher, Kathy Pullman, roams the room. When the hour ends, no group has an answer. "This happens to be a particularly difficult...
...peer into Pullman's classroom is to glimpse why math has once again become a battleground in America's education wars. This school year, nearly half of all American elementary students are expected to learn math the way children do at Fernangeles Elementary: not in neat rows of desks, repeating times tables and memorizing theorems, but through trial-and-error problem solving, often in groups with little direct instruction and almost always with a calculator nearby. Advocates call it "interactive" or "inventive" math and insist that it sets American schoolchildren on the way to becoming "mathematically powerful...
...have no idea where Peov is today. Seng was adopted by a family in Massachusetts, and the last I heard from him he was studying math in a university. If the two of them saw the televised pictures of Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge show trial, I cannot imagine what they thought...
Texas is a national leader in high-stakes testing, having instituted a statewide high school exit exam in 1985 at the urging of a committee chaired by Ross Perot. Since then scores have climbed. In 1993, 51% of Texas 10th-graders passed all three sections of the TAAS--math, reading, writing--on the first try. This year 67% did. (Students get eight tries over three years...
Proponents of testing respond that while it may be unfair to deny graduation to a kid who has passed his or her courses, it's also unfair to let a student graduate who can't read or do math. "You've got to start sometime saying to kids that the tests of the real world are going to flunk you anyway," says E.D. Hirsch Jr., author of Cultural Literacy. "Tough love is the right kind of fairness. And you have to change the system with shock treatment at some point...