11 Plus Exams Forum

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04gw6rh" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"Having researched the way maths is taught in schools in the UK and in the US, Stanford University professor Jo Boaler says pupils are too often made to think that maths is a long list of rules and procedures to be learned off by heart."

That is how my DD saw it (and sometimes still sees it) but was much taken by this Einstein quote:

"Pure mathematics is, in it's way, the poetry of logical ideas."

Very appealing to a person who has a natural affinity for the arts and has been useful in the dark days when she is simply grinding out answers to sums.

I am sure I have heard Tom Wright, former bishop of Durham and now professor of New Testament studies at St Andrews, in an interview or lecture where he was talking about scientists and faith. He was lamenting on not being able to fit maths in when he chose his A'levels, as he saw the elegance and beauty of the subject.

I like this quote by Galileo:

"Philosophy is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth."

Unfortunately rather than inspiring children that maths is the language of the universe which describes and explains the very nature of reality itself, it seems more common to teach it as a mundane tool for working out shopping bills!

I would encourage posters to listen to the programme ...

Guest55 wrote:I would encourage posters to listen to the programme ...

Good luck with that G55
I thought the programme was really interesting and would be an anathema to the shove it in and spew it out school of tutoring

I loved that clip of the child arguing that 6 was an odd number because it was 3groups of 2:a phenomenon with no name in maths.

It would be fair to say, however, that Boaler is a controversial figure, and there are people expressing some scepticism about her claims both from a theoretical point of view and from a "well, the data doesn't actually say that" point of view.

Summary, with links: http://www.qedcat.com/archive/141.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

More recent developments: http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2 ... d-kind-of/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Canadian projects inspired by Boaler et al appear not to have been successful, although there is a lot of noise in the data and a lot of noise from the various factions.

https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/12 ... PS1128.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/malkin-dar ... 86019.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/13 ... to-basics/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

(Note that "new math" in this context means discovery methods, not the "new math" of the 1960s, of which we could do with more of now, involving set theory, discrete maths and abstract algebras).