LeftoverPi

It caused (I understand) no small consternation for parents, who didn't know how to help their kids with it, and (I would guess) was probably frustrating for many teachers. I think that I personally would have liked things like learning about set theory and stuff, but what I like...well...doesn't usually intersect too strongly with the rest of the world. [note: you can see the New Math entry on Wikipedia for a better informed take on what the New Math actually entailed].

But it was way too theoretical, or way too advanced, or way too done-by-scientists-who-didn't-remember-being-kids, or way too ohmigosh-sputnik-make-our-kids-smarter, and it didn't last. And it was largely looked back at as a failed experiment. You can hear a hilarious Tom Lehrer song about it (that link is from the Wikipedia page, and claims to be "official"--there are various YouTube videos that act it out, which are reasonably fun to watch as well) that gives you an idea of the sentiment, or at least the kinds of jokes about it that people thought were funny.

When the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics brought forth a document commonly referred to as "The NCTM Standards" (shortened to "the Standards" in most discussions), a lot of people capitalized on this earlier (reputation as a) failure by calling the Standards "the New New Math". I don't know when that particular salvo was fired, but I'll bet it was pretty early on. In any event, very shortly after their publication, the Math Wars were on. The "reformers" wanted to implement Standards-based curriculum everywhere. "Conservatives" or "anti-reformers" (I'm not sure what they call themselves--"sane", probably :) ) were pretty much horrified with the movement, and created their own organizations (see Mathematically Correct's website for what I think is the best-known and largest example) to work against what they saw as the destruction of mathematics education in our country.

I started out pretty much reform-minded. Reformers were Constructivists, which is an educational philosophy I generally agree with, and a lot of the Standards-based stuff was focused on giving the kids "ownership" of the material. Like leading them to discover an algorithm for themselves, for example, or letting them pick their own strategy to solve a problem (e.g. draw a picture of five groups of three and count, count by fives verbally, just use the fact that you know 5x3 is 15, etc). So, for a while, I considered myself a reformer.

I participated in NCTM-l, a listserv (email mailing list) that was formed to discuss the use of the Standards, and generally when I argued I argued on the reformer side. As conversations on the internet frequently do, the ones on that list got heated (and often personal). I remember mostly the amount of time it was taking me from work to try to read it and participate. :) I actually did try to listen to the "other side" and try to see where they were coming from. (In case you are interested, you can read some of my posts and the discussion around them then at my barely-breathing site, fulcrum.org.)

Perhaps it was the fact that I started to see the plight of the "other side" that led me to drop out of the discussion. I am sure that time was a factor...hard to recall exactly. But I know that at some point I started wondering if reform of the current system, in the form people were talking about, had any hope of doing what I thought needed to be done.

And I think then was when I realized that I didn't fit on a "side".

Tune in later for another exciting episode about the Math Wars and how I got orthogonal to them!