Quote:
This was my initiation into the world of reform math. It is a world where understanding takes precedence over procedure and process trumps content. In this world, memorization is looked down upon as "rote learning" and thus addition and subtraction facts are not drilled in the classroom--it's something for students to learn at home. Inefficient methods for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing are taught in the belief that such methods expose the conceptual underpinning of what is happening during these operations. The standard (and efficient) methods for these operations are delayed sometimes until 4th and 5th grades, when students are deemed ready to learn procedural fluency.[ emphasis added: Comment--- I added the emphasis because rote learning was how I learned it and I was fairly good at math.]
Further comment:
I wrote a computer software program that taught basic math skills through repetition, or as it is known, rote learning. It wasn't successful commercially, but I thought it was a fairly good idea.
This story looks like a case of what Rush Limbaugh calls the feminization of America. Girls don't like math, boys do better at it. Ooops! That's sexist of me. But why isn't this practice sexist? Because someone in authority says so.
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