November meeting, continued

I kept waiting for someone to bring up the math curriculum at last Monday's meeting, and finally a brave parent from the studio audience asked the superintendent what she thought of the recent letters to the editor about the new math. While Dr. Baehr had not seen the letters, she is aware of the debate and said that it was somewhat like the old argument about whether reading should be taught with an all-phonics or all-whole language approach. The answer, of course, is that we need both, and she claims that the same is true of math. You do need to teach the basic facts to give kids the foundation to build on, but you also can gain a lot of benefit from the approach that lets students work in groups, discover new ways of getting at the answers, learn from each other, etc. At least that's the theory; somehow I don't think a lot of parents are convinced. I'm going to try to pull together some of the arguments for the new math to see how they stand up to the criticisms, hopefully by tomorrow.