It’s Still About the Math!

 

 The great realization came in 1957 with the Soviet launching of the Sputnik satellite.  The beginnings of the “Space Race” exposed just how far behind American students were in science and math.  In an effort to deal with the blow to America’s esteem, the US government has attempted to improve the level of math skills in American School students. The National Defense Education Act (NDEA), The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and to some extent No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top all had improvement of math skills in their plans. For sure that some of the suggestions and innovative programs worked in some of the schools, but throughout the country there was no uniform quantum leap in students’ ability to deal with numbers.

In 1991, Professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (of Cultural Literacy fame), founded the Core Knowledge Foundation. Kirsch and his colleagues tried to quantify the bodies of knowledge in the school subject areas by grade level that every student should know. In his book, “What your 2^nd Grader need to Know” Hirsch devotes about 60 pages to math skills encompassing time, measurement, geometry  and money as well as addition, subtraction and multiplication.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (www.nctm.org) has long taken a leadership role in math skills improvement nationwide. Their vision is to “is to inspire, energize, motivate, and stimulate creativity.”

A number of school districts throughout the country have turned to the International Baccalaureate Program (IBP) because of its rigorous academic program in critical subjects- including math. The middle school math curriculum tackles the following  areas:

·  algebra

·  geometry and trigonometry

·  statistics and probability

·  discrete mathematics

For more information about the IBP you can access their website at www.ibp.org./

Clearly it’s time to bring in the heavy hitters, especially with younger students to show them that math can be fun and important.  So the Sesame Street characters, The Count, Elmo, Big Bird, and company have been recruited as math teachers for our youngest students. The program is called” Math is Everywhere (http://www.sesamestreet.org/cms_services/services?action=download&fileName=For%20Teachers:%20Math%20is%20Everywhere&uid=c9c23d0c-8cee-4958-a865-68ea5fb7224a) and provides tips galore to teachers and parents to make learning math fun right along with their Sesame Street pals.

It has been almost 55 years since Sputnik and while the US eventually did win the space race- if that’s what you call getting to the moon first -but it is still behind many of its European and Asian counterparts in math supremacy.

In Jun, 2010 the government released the Common Core State Mathematics Standards (CCSMS) which is to be phased into school across the United States in 2014. This will be closest thing that America school will to a national curriculum and should become a driving force in refocusing school mathematics textbooks. For a complete look at the standards, all 94 pages, access the following web site. http://corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_Math%20Standards.pdf

As we continue to lose jobs overseas and we continue to find our high school graduates woefully unprepared to face  the workforce and adult life,  and as we continue to see the dropout rate increase- we must  come to the urgent realization that in many aspects ‘It’s all about the math.”

Oct. 14,2011