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Frank Quinn doesn't like calculators: (what about his dog?) The current (May 2008) NOTICES OF THE AMS contains the following opinion piece from Virginia Tech mathematician, Frank Quinn. It bears noting that the mathematics education folks at his university are members of the math department, which must make for some fun faculty meetings. K–12 Calculator Woes In the third grade my daughter complained that she wasn’t learning to read. She switched schools, was classified as Learning Disabled, and with special instruction quickly caught up. The problem was that her first teacher used a visual word recognition approach to reading, but my daughter has a strong verbal orientation. The method did not connect with her strongest learning channel and her visual channel could not compensate. The LD teacher recognized this and changed to a phonics approach. My daughter was not alone. So many children had trouble that verbal methods are now widely used and companies make money offering phonics ...

Joseph Mazur , dangerous guy If you want to get educational traditionalists all aflutter, say something the implies that rote learning may not be all it's cracked up to be. It's about as effective in stirring up ire as burning a US flag in front of the local branch of the American Legion (though I think impugning rote learning isn't likely to get one arrested, jailed, or fined. Yet.) Because I'm basically a bad person, I like to post without comment quotations I consider interesting and potentially provocative on lists inhabited by knee-jerk anti-progressives and educational conservatives. The resulting furor is remarkable, more so because I don't say a word about what I think is noteworthy, supportable, brilliant, or absurd in the passages. Naturally, on lists like math-teach@mathforum.org, where I've participated in various ways since about 1994, my reputation precedes me, and it's a safe bet that those who aren't fond of me or my ideas are sure they a...

Last week, there was a public conversation/Q & A session on the National Math Panel Report between two members of the body that produced it: Vern Williams and Francis "Skip" Fennell . Unfortunately, work commitments prevented me from hearing it live and attempting to participate by submitting questions. I had to satisfy my curiosity as to how anti-progressives through the voice of Mr. Williams, would try to spin matters by reading the transcript this morning. Or, I should say, as much of it as I could tolerate given that I had made the error of eating my breakfast before assaying the task. Your mileage may vary, and it is to be hoped that stronger stomachs than mine can slog through it all. I gave up after Mr. Williams' third answer, but then, I'm dangerously close to overdosing on the rhetoric and nonsense of the educational right wing. I will simply look below at the first few comments from Mr. Williams: [Comment From Matt] How do we use the recommendations t...

Yesterday I posted to several lists something about a recent presentation by Jim Stigler entitled, " Reflections on Mathematics Teaching and How to Improve It ." Quotations from Prof. Stigler's presentation engendered one puzzled reaction from an anonymous skeptic who opined: The way I understand the word is used in the U.S., diversity is to be celebrated, and the schools are to accommodate the students rather than the students being made to conform to the schools. Japan, on the other hand, is famously one of the least diverse places on earth. And yet, even in Japan, according to the article, individual Japanese students do not know exactly how to be students so they are explicitly instructed. This sounds to me like the student is made to conform to the expectations of the school, not the school "accommodating diversity" in the American sense. This does not seem to support the "every country has diversity" assertion and therefore "different strate...