Deep Thoughts started as Jack Handy's running joke on TV's Saturday Night Live -- a series of mock-inspirational messages about life that make no sense at all. Now "Deep Thoughts" are available on greeting cards, including one that pokes fun at the fuzzy new math in the schools. The card says: Instead of having `answers' on a math test, they should just call them `impressions,' and if you got a different `impression,' so what, can't we all be brothers?
Pretty funny. But it's hard for satire to stay ahead of actual events these days, particularly in education. The New-New Math, as it is sometimes called, has a high-minded goal: Get beyond traditional math drills by helping students understand and enjoy mathematical concepts. But in practice, alas, the New-New Math is yet another educational Deep Thought.
Basic skills are pushed to the margin by theory and the idea that students should not be passive receivers of rules but self-discoverers, gently guided by teachers, who are co-learners, not authority figures with lessons to impart. Correct answers aren't terribly important. Detractors call it whole math, because students frequently end up guessing at answers, just as children exposed to the whole language fad in English classes end up guessing at words they can't pronounce. Although the Wicked Whole-Language Witch is dying, the Whole-Math Witch isn't even ill, said Wayne Bishop, professor of mathematics at California State University--Los Angeles.
Mathematically Correct, a San Diego-based group which strongly opposes whole math, recently posted a list of commandments on its Web site, including Honor the correct answer more than the guess, Give good grades only for good work, and Avoid vague objectives.
Bologna sandwich? Those vague objectives include meandering exercises that have little to do with math, such as illustrating data collection by having second-graders draw pictures of their lunch, then cut the pictures out and put them in paper bags. Worse, the New- New Math comes with the usual stew of ed-school obsessions about feelings, self-esteem, dumbing down, and an all-around politically correct agenda.
Marianne Jennings, a professor at Arizona State University, found that her teenage daughter was getting an A in algebra but had no idea how to solve an equation. So Jennings acquired a copy of her daughter's textbook. The real title is Secondary Math: an Integrated Approach: Focus on Algebra, but Jennings calls it Rain Forest Algebra.
It includes Maya Angelou's poetry, pictures of President Clinton and Mali wood carvings, lectures on what environmental sinners we all are and photos of students with names such as Tatuk and Esteban who offer my daughter thoughts on life. It also contains praise for the wife of Pythagoras, father of the Pythagorean theorem, and asks students such mathematical brain teasers as What role should zoos play in our society? However, equations don't show up until Page 165, and the first solution of a linear equation, which comes on Page 218, is reached by guessing and checking.
Jennings points out that Focus on Algebra is 812 pages long, compared with 200 for the average math textbook in Japan. This would explain why the average standardized score is 80 in Japan and 52 here, she says. Marks do seem to head south when New-New Math appears. In well-off Palo Alto, Calif., public-school math students dropped from the 86th percentile nationally to the 58th in the first year of New- New teaching, then went back up the next year to the 77th percentile when the schools moderated their approach.
The New-New Math has become a carrier for the aggressive multiculturalism spreading inexorably through the schools. Literature from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which is promoting whole math, is filled with suggestions on how to push multiculturalism in arithmetic and math classes.
New-New Math is also vaguely allied with an alleged new field of study called ethnomathematics. Most of us may think that math is an abstract and universal discipline that has little to do with ethnicity. But a lot of ethnomathematicians, who are busy holding conferences and writing books, say that all peoples have a natural culturebound mathematics. Western math, in this view, isn't universal but an expression of white male culture imposed on nonwhites. Much of this is the usual ranting about Eurocentrism. Ethnomathematics, a book of collected essays, starts by reminding us that Geographically, Europe does not exist, since it is only a peninsula on the vast Eurasian continent. . . . Before long, there is a reference to the so-called Pythagorean theorem. Much of the literature claims that nonliterate peoples indicated their grasp of math in many ways, from quilt patterns to an ancient African bone cut with marks that may have been used for counting.
It's all rather stunning nonsense, but this is where multiculturalism is right now. Unless you are headed for an engineering school working with Yoruba calculators, or unless you wish to balance your checkbook the ancient Navajo way, it's probably safe to ignore the whole thing.