Math Anxiety and Common Core

One of the central points of the Common Core educational reform is to teach fewer topics but teach them more thoroughly, so that students really understand them. The national Common Core standards are vague to the point that I can hardly fathom what they are about, but it seems that when it comes to math, New York state is interpreting Common Core math according to the tradition of the earlier reform movement known as New Math:

Ms. Nelams said she did not recognize the approaches her children, ages 7 to 10, were being asked to use on math work sheets. They were frustrated by the pictures, dots and sheer number of steps needed to solve some problems. Her husband, who is a pipe designer for petroleum products at an engineering firm, once had to watch a YouTube video before he could help their fifth-grade son with his division homework.

“They say this is rigorous because it teaches them higher thinking,” Ms. Nelams said. “But it just looks tedious.”

Math reformers have been saying for decades that students hate math because it is taught as the rote memorization of the multiplication table, without any understanding of the concepts behind the numbers. And they still are:

The guidelines are based on research that shows that students taught conceptually retain the math they learn. And many longtime math teachers, including those in organizations like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics, have championed the standards.

“I taught math very much like the Common Core for many years,” said Linda M. Gojak, president of the National Council of Teachers of Math. “When parents would question it, my response was ‘Just hang in there with me,’ and at the end of the year they would come and say this was the best year their kids had in math.”

Yeah, right. Loath as I am to agree with anyone who works for the American Enterprise Institute, I think this guy has it right:

“It is incredibly easy for these new instructional approaches to look good on paper or to work well in pilot classrooms in the hands of highly skilled experts,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, “and then to turn into mushy, lazy confusing goop as it spreads out to classrooms and textbooks.”

It can't be said enough that curricula and textbooks and standards and what-all are trivial in importance compared to the one really important thing in education, the interaction between teacher and student. And if the teachers are not comfortable with the material they are teaching and perhaps don't fully understand it themselves, the quality of that interaction will be damaged. Nor is it a small thing to exclude parents from the equation; how many children will see that their parents don't understand this stuff and decide that they don't have to, either? I don't doubt that Linda Gojak can be successful teaching conceptual math, but does that mean everyone should try?

Did these people learn nothing from the failure of New Math? Well, maybe they learned one thing, since I don't see any set theory or Venn diagrams in the new stuff. But speaking as someone who loves math and occasionally used fairly sophisticated statistics, I just don't see any reason why most people should know anything about the conceptual underpinnings of math. Even if it is true that students taught this way test better, is that worth spreading the notion that math education is about learning complex ways to do simple stuff, and that what the government does with tax dollars is spend billions trying to make people understand mathematical arcana instead of just memorizing the multiplication table?

I predict that this movement will flame out as spectacularly as New Math did. I hope it doesn't drag the rest of Common Core down with it.