New Math Policies Would Hurt Gifted Students
Commentary
Perhaps Alan Erisman, who headed a team of applied mathematicians at Boeing, sums up the education of numbers best.
Erisman, author of the upcoming book “The Math Myth,” says, “If we taught English the way we teach math, students would spend all their time doing spelling tests and diagramming sentences but never read a great book or ever read poetry.”
That seems to be one of the issues the California’s Instructional Quality Commission is seeking to address as it updates its list of suggestions to math instructors. It’s seeking to determine how to help students reach the math standards established by the state.
Time in school is limited. Are we requiring the right kinds of math? Who even needs it?
Charles Ungerleider is a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who writes a blog on education and took two years of Latin in three years. SHARES In BC a student seeking undergraduate admissions to arts must have taken Pre-Calculus 11 or Foundations of Mathematics 12. Do the benefits add up?
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When I was in Grade 8, I enrolled in Latin 1 “because,” my mother said, “you can’t get into university without Latin.” This view was corroborated by the school guidance counsellor and the parents of all my friends. Going to university was not a matter of discussion as far as my parents were concerned.