A new trend is the use of a calculator for EVERYTHING. While we demand mastery at Gideon which requires memorization of basic math facts, many students (from high performing school districts) we see are still counting (or even multiplying!) on their fingers. There is an added problem that with teaching Connected Mathematics which doesn’t see a need to teach long division of larger numbers as it can be done on a calculator and CM sees it as a waste of classroom time.
While doing some education classes at a major Texas university over ten years ago to be able to be certified to teach secondary math in here, I was repeatedly told to incorporate technology into my lessons and show ways it made the lesson more interesting to students. (Is the goal to be interesting or effective?) I’m fairly old school and didn’t see the need for the graphing calculators most of the time, and luckily the school where I student taught (and later taught for 1 year) agreed with me. However, when I taught students fresh out of the local middle school, they were very upset with me when I did not allow calculators on quizzes or tests. Many could not tell me 6 x 8 in Algebra I as ninth graders.
When Longfellow Middle School in Falls Church, Va., recently renovated its classrooms, Vern Williams, who might be the best math teacher in the country, had to fight to keep his blackboard. The school was putting in new “interactive whiteboards” in every room, part of a broader effort to increase the use of technology in education. That might sound like a welcome change. But this effort, part of a nationwide trend, is undermining American education, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. It is beginning to do to our educational system what the transformation to industrial agriculture has done to our food system over the past half century: efficiently produce a deluge of cheap, empty calories.
I went to see Williams because he was famous when I was in middle school 20 years ago, at a different school in the same county. Longfellow’s teams have been state champions for 24 of the last 29 years in MathCounts, a competition for middle schoolers. Williams was the only actual teacher on a 17-member National Mathematics Advisory Panel that reported to President Bush in 2008.
Williams doesn’t just prefer his old chalkboard to the high-tech version. His kids learn from textbooks that are decades old—not because they can’t afford new ones, but because Williams and a handful of his like-minded colleagues know the old ones are better. The school’s parent-teacher association buys them from used bookstores because the county won’t pay for them (despite the plentiful money for technology). His preferred algebra book, he says, is “in-your-face algebra. They give amazing outstanding examples. They teach the lessons.”
Technology is designed to make our lives easier, but there are some skills that should be learned anyway. Let’s say fractions is difficult for you, and the calculator will give you the answer easily. Should you never bother to learn how to add fractions? This is similar to saying that since I don’t like to cook and there are plenty of restaurants, I shouldn’t bother to learn how to cook. There may be situations you need to be prepared for – such taking the GMAT where a calculator isn’t allowed in the quantitative section or in my cooking case, needing to save money by eating at home. Konstantin continues:
Math and science can be hard to learn—and that’s OK. The proper job of a teacher is not to make it easy, but to guide students through the difficulty by getting them to practice and persevere. “Some of the best basketball players on Earth will stand at that foul line and shoot foul shots for hours and be bored out of their minds,” says Williams. Math students, too, need to practice foul shots: adding fractions, factoring polynomials. And whether or not the students are bright, “once they buy into the idea that hard work leads to cool results,” Williams says, you can work with them.
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