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Parrot Math
By Thomas C. O'Brien
In Phi Beta Kappan, February 1999
ABSTRACT
(beginning of the article): The critics claim that their approach is the only correct approach. Although
some of their most vocal leaders have no apparent expertise in mathematics and
no experience teaching mathematics at any level, they say that anyone who criticizes
them is not a mathematician or doesn't understand how students learn mathematics.
Their understanding of how children learn mathematics gives short shrift to
the notion that knowledge is a personally constructed network of ideas, information,
images, and relationships that tends toward coherence, stability, economy, and
generalizability. They criticize new approaches to the teaching of math -- approaches that can
be summarized by saying that math should make sense to children and that children
should be thinkers rather than storage bins for thinking done by others. They
also argue that constructivism is a fad -- this despite 80 years of empirical
research, replicated worldwide, on the construction and growth of children's
thinking about essential mathematical and scientific ideas, such as number,
space, logic, causality, classification, and contradiction. The main findings
of this body of research -- that the development of knowledge comes from an
interaction between knower and known, that children's thinking is very different
from adults' thinking, and that social interaction is a major cause of intellectual
growth -- are foreign to them. In the field of children's learning of arithmetic,
there is significant research to show that the force-feeding of computational
procedures is harmful. But the critics continue to insist that arithmetic --
and knowledge in general -- is inert stuff to be transmitted and stored.
A small but vociferous group of very well-organized
critics is espousing a return to "parrot math." These critics believe that mathematics
education in elementary schools should be confined largely to arithmetic and
that mathematics should be taught by the force-feeding of inert facts and procedures
shorn of any real-life context. They have no tolerance for children's invented
strategies or original thinking, and they leave no room for children's use of
estimation or calculators.
Go to the full article.
www.MathematicallySane.com
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