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Victor Hobson/ Cato June/ Fred Goodman I recently posted on some ideas of Fred Goodman, Layman E. Allen, Sheldon Wolin, and the relationships among puzzles, games, democratic values and mathematics education. I've received some very interesting and encouraging replies, both on and off the comments section of this blog in response to that entry, but none more engaging and useful than the one Fred Goodman sent recounting an anecdote he'd told me once or twice before, the exact details of which had escaped me (though I knew that Vic Hobson was the central figure). With Fred's kind permission, I include it here in its full context: At a very theoretical level, John Searle builds directly on games as the ideal illustration of the "construction of social reality" in his book by that name. I distinguish between Layman's emphasis on "literal" games and my emphasis on "metaphorical" (although I strongly bel...

In A Spacious Place: Games and Grades If you found the recent post about Fred Goodman and Layman Allen of interest, you might enjoy the above.

Pictured above are University of Michigan Professor of Education Emeritus, Frederick Goodman, and UM Professor of Law, Layman E. Allen. I was lucky enough to have the former as my informal mentor during my graduate studies in mathematics education at the UM School of Education The latter I have known of by reputation since I was in my early teens and bumped into his game of symbolic logic, WFF 'n' Proof, and then via his professional and personal friendship with Fred Goodman. It was Fred who was kind enough to recently introduce me to the work of the brilliant and eloquent Sheldon Wolin, whose essay on matters pertinent to the Math Wars inspired the previous entry to this blog. In a private response to that blog entry, Fred mentioned some ideas about educational games and democratic values that he thought were relevant to what I had posted. I share what he sent me below with his kind permission: Games, Gods and Grades (Fred Goodman, 1/27/07) School grades may be misleading beca...

The new vision of education is the acquisition of the specific job skills needed in a high-tech society. There are some striking consequences of this definition of education or, rather, the redefinition of it. One is that the principal purpose of education is no longer conceived primarily in terms of the development of the person. In the past, the person was understood in complex terms of diverse potentialities. The academic subjects to be studied represented not only different methods of understanding but elements of a different sensibility. Becoming a person meant embarking on a quest for the harmonizing of diverse sensibilities. The rejection of that conception of person can be measured by the disappearance of the older rhetoric about “personal discovery,” “the exploration of diverse possibilities,” or “initiation into a rich cultural heritage.” In its place is an anti-sixties rhetoric which is really an attack on education as the representation of human diversity. Or it is the rhet...

On p. 7 of the current issue of the MAA FOCUS  one may read the following, which I presume is presented as biting satire of an event the author would apparently find heinous should it become reality: Outsourcing Mathematics: Is a News Story Like This Possible? A nightmare from Michael Henle, Oberlin College. Dystopia Times Mathematics Department Shuts Down Monday, May 3, 2010. Nemesis College announced today the dissolution of its mathematics department. No details were given, only the statement that the future mathematical needs of its students would be met outside the traditional Department of Mathematics setting. We wondered what this meant. Could it really be true that students at Nemesis would no longer be subjected to the universally unpopular subject of mathematics? To find out, we interviewed Professor Earnest, the former chair of the mathematics department. He met us in his old office, surrounded by half-packed boxes of books. We asked first if this action on the part of the C...

One popular complaint amongst anti-reform pundits is that so-called reform/"fuzzy" math advocates and the programs they create and/or teach from "hate" standard arithmetic algorithms and fail to teach them. While I have not found this to be the case in actual classrooms with real teachers using EVERYDAY MATHEMATICS, INVESTIGATIONS IN NUMBER DATA & SPACE, or MATH TRAILBLAZERS were being used (the so-called "standard" algorithms are ALWAYS taught, and frequently given pride of place by teachers regardless of the program being taught), the claim begs the question of how and why a given algorithm became "standard" as well as how being "standard" automatically means "superior" or "the only one students should have the opportunity to learn or use." It strikes me that it is almost as if such people are stuck in some pre-technological age in which we trained low-level white collar office workers to be scribes, number-cru...

In the first part of this look at the questionable notions of William G. Quirk about the TERC elementary math curriculum, INVESTIGATIONS IN NUMBER, DATA, AND SPACE , I analyzed the interesting deceptions in the title of his recent propaganda effort, " 2008 TERC Math vs. 2008 National Math Panel Recommendations ." Now the time has come to look at some of the specific charges against INVESTIGATIONS leveled by Mr. Quirk and expose them for what they are. First, Mr. Quirk asserts: "A major objective of elementary math education is to provide the foundations for algebra, the gateway to higher math education. Although we call it "elementary math," K-5 math content is quite sophisticated and not easy to master. But constructivist math educators believe that concrete methods, pictorial methods, and learning by playing games are the keys to a stress-free approach." It can't be easy to squeeze so much inaccuracy into so small a space, but Mr. Quirk is adept ...