I hope everyone had a wonderful summer! I had some time to read, found more grist for the mill, and strangely for someone who suffered from writer's block in her youth, I even missed the writing.
When I was 5-years-old and well before the advent of electronic games, my parents gave me a box of 52 board games. In those days, it was an unusual gift for a girl and I managed to wear down the printing on the boards through endless use. My extended family loved card games too. I remember as a young child being tutored by a great aunt on the finer points of bridge. I was often pressed into service as the fourth player in endless games.
By the time I started school, I already had some basic mathematical concepts down pat. Playing a game of snakes-and-ladders encourages basic counting skills, checkers requires the use of spatial skills, and Tetris teaches the visualization of geometric shapes. But for me, the fun continued outside the bounds of the games as I saw patterns in bathroom tiles and took pride in doubling the ingredients in a recipe. As I child, I loved math.
Which brings me to this week's topic. Many students don't love math anymore, which is a real shame. We now know that children who listen to and enjoy music, play board games, or cook do better in math. This week, most everyone seems to be weighing in on teaching math since EQAO scores in Ontario have fallen significantly for students in grade 3 and grade 6.
Many are saying it's for lack of competent math teachers but to my mind, this is but another example of scapegoating. It is also a simplistic response to a problem with many contributing factors. One is that today's math curriculum is more intense in terms of the difficulty of the content and the amount of material covered. Mathematical concepts I learnt in a university calculus course are now routinely taught in grade 9 math courses and some concepts, such as the notion of infinity, have even crept into the elementary curriculum. There is also a problem with how math is taught as teachers are told to teach it creatively and by posing verbal problems.
This summer, I read the book The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at MIT who is known for his research on visual cognition and the psychology of language. One of the claims in his book is that the notion of brain plasticity has gone too far. I'm not doing justice to his argument but in a nutshell, Pinker states the brain is mostly hardwired except for some fuzziness around the boundaries of areas in the primary sensory cortex, the part of the brain that controls for movement and sensory processing. For example, if a part of the sensory cortex that controls for the use of a particular finger is damaged, the part that directs the movement of an adjacent finger may be pressed into service to take over the work of the damaged area. This is what is meant by plasticity; one part of the brain taking over the function of another. Still there are very real limitations to plasticity and the brain cannot rewire itself holus-bolus.
Yet in a way, this is what we assume in teaching math. Through the current curriculum, we are essentially asking the verbal area of the brain to engage in mathematical reasoning, something it's ill-equipped to do. This wonderful insight is not mine but came from a conversation with Dr. Jay Giedd, who is with the National Institute of Mental Health and is a well-respected authority on the functioning of the adolescent brain. If we are making such a grave error by ignoring, or even worse, working against the brain's physiology with our teaching methods, why are we then surprised when children don't learn math?
Having debunked the current math curriculum, let me somewhat reverse myself and say that the new math approach is likely useful in teaching older children, those who have already mastered basic math concepts. It is important that students learn to use math in a creative way to solve real world problems but this teaching should come after they have become adept at manipulating math, after the area of the brain that specializes in processing math has learnt the basic concepts. We don't teach reading before children know the alphabet. Similarly like the phonics vs. whole word debate, the question of how best to teach mathematics will likely be settled through a greater understanding of how the brain functions, how children learn, along with an improvement in teaching methods.
The world is a complicated place and mathematics is a very useful tool in shining a particular light on its complexity. In this blog, I try to link my personal experiences, the only ones I can truly know, to a very incomplete knowledge of history and theory that I've often stumbled upon by happenstance. There is so much information available today that it is impossible for any person to make sense of it all especially when dabbling in various areas of study. Thanks in part to a love of mathematics, I continue to hold fast to the notion that it is possible to make sense of the world.
The views expressed in this blog are personal opinions only.
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