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Dumb Government School "new new math"
Posted:
Jun 12, 1996 7:44 PM
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The "new new math" isn't really about math at all (see below) It is about
educationist control of the minds of children and the educationist attempt to
turn children against God, parents, and country.
David L. Hanson
"The fool says in his heart, there is no God"
From the Mathematically Correct website:
(http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/mathman/)
Whole Math in Escondido
We have had a plethora of Whole Math programs in the district. Two of
the three High Schools had gone completely over to Whole Math for
incoming freshmen: Orange Glen - This high school had two Whole Math
programs all by itself.
1. College Prep Math (CPM) from UC Davis (used to be Change From Within)
- This is the program invading San Diego City Schools. It roughly
follows the traditional sequence, but is not a traditional math program.
It follows the California Framework ideals of group work and
constructivism where the students must teach themselves the math in
groups without previous instruction. Students are not allowed to ask
individual questions - this is reserved for the group. It is based
entirely on word problems. (The course has no practice problems.)
Number based practice problems are demeaned as "rote" or "drill and
kill". This course has a small to medium social engineering content and
much attention is devoted to writing about math instead of actually
doing it. THE SCHOOL HAS DROPPED THIS PROGRAM FOR NEW STUDENTS!
Students currently enrolled will be allowed to finish the sequence if
they so desire.
2. Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP) from UC Berkeley - This program
is easily the worst of the programs we have. It does not follow the
traditional sequence and therefore will not appropriately prepare
students for traditional science classes in a timely manner. It is
constructivist in nature, promotes group-only student questions, has no
practice problems, and has a huge social engineering content - the math
seems almost secondary. As a result, it's an incredibly weak program.
Looking through the pages you find problems based on radical
environmentalism, HIV/AIDS instruction, child abuse, social studies,
science, geography, "finding the perfect group", and many others. Much
of this material is highly questionable. For instance, the child abuse
problem has the student calculate the number of unreported child abuse
cases given certain statistics and then asks the student HOW THEY WOULD
VOTE on a screening program for child abuse! It also has students
writing about bees when the only connection to math is the shape of the
cells in a beehive. This is very stupid stuff. It is due to be on the
general market by the end of the year. Please note that this program is
not yet in general release (information from the IMP Web page), but our
district still claims it is not experimenting with children's education.
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