A refreshing op-ed in Sunday's Seattle Post Intelligencer -- "The M Word: Cultivating a culture where math comes alive for children":
Want to know why fewer than 20 percent of fourth-grade students in Seattle's Central District elementary schools pass the math section of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning in any given year?Read the whole thing,. The writer, Norman Alston, started the organization Explorations in Math to help elementary students succeed in math. The program encourages schools and parents to supplement the school math curriculum with math-intensive games and other activities to get young children to use more math outside the classroom. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 05, 2004 08:21 AMAs a black man who grew up in the Central District, graduated from Garfield High School and now teaches math in the Seattle and Lake Washington school districts, I do not offer race or money as explanations for the failure. Nor do I fault Washington state's standardized test. No, these kids and others in environments like theirs fail because they have virtually no exposure to math outside of the limited time they spend learning it in the classroom. What these students need -- and what students in other parts of the region get -- is a math culture at school supported by parents.
That article in the P-I stands out against their usual tone like Kipling's 'ripe bananas in a smokehouse'. Alston's actually got a useful approach to the innumeracy problem (which the P-I editors share in spades with the Central District schoolkids), and it should be supported. It would be unrealistic to hope that the P-I would continue with a series of articles addressing this approach, since it wasn't invented by the WEA and doesn't depend on another lavish round of money delivered to members of that union. But I'm hoping anyway.
And see Robert Jamieson's column in Monday's P-I, supporting Bill Cosby's second eruption against fashionable illiteracy among black students. The P-I handily evaded taking notice of Cosby's first addressing of the problem, but now here it is in the B section. The editors maintain their silent oblivion. Today, their pressing problems are Tim Eyman, an orca's travails, and the capping of wine bottles.
Lightweights.
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on July 5, 2004 09:29 AMWhen I was going to (Catholic) school back in the fifties and sixties I remember that the black kids did quite well in math -- not the top, that spot was reserved for a (sister's pet) asian, but always very good....when I graduated from college (Catholic) the top honors in physics went to a black student (who went on to do graduate work at MIT) and in nursing to a black woman, although I believe that a close relative of hers -- father, uncle, brother -- was a doctor, so for political correctness sake, she doesn't really count today...I went to graduate school before personal computers so when an accounting-type problem was given I had a black neighbor lady the first black woman to graduate from u of w (?) in math take a look -- she could spot in seconds a mistake on a hand-written spreadsheet of numbers. She told me once that "numbers talked to her"...her son who was a few years older than I has a degree in nuclear physics....maybe it was the times (or my Catholic schools) but I cannot remember any black student failing...especially in math.
Posted by: memory lane on July 5, 2004 11:54 AMCall me cynical but my reading of this article is rather different. The paper is arguing that the way to teach math is through new-agey educational games, presumably instead of old fashioned methods like multiplication tables. A few weeks ago the paper had an article on reading that criticized the phonics-based methods used by home schoolers and sang the praises of whole-language methods.
Posted by: John Doe on July 5, 2004 07:40 PM