Why Did Math Have to Change? 5 Reasons Why
As an elementary teacher I have heard this a lot! Many parents have been asking for the last decade why the math worksheets seem so complicated. Why the teachers are teaching math in a weird way? What’s wrong with the way we always did it? These parents are frustrated, they don’t know how to support their kids because they didn’t learn it that way and they often feel it is dumb.
I will admit, there are a lot of bad worksheets out there. Textbooks, tests and teachers make mistakes sometimes so, it is quite possible you are a parent who has legitimately ran into a bad problem. However, I am addressing why math teaching NEEDED a shift and why the shift that was made is certainly for the best (poorly written problems excluded!)
Reason 1
America is full of adults who hate math and are pretty bad at it. Most use their phones to do simple calculations and rely on visualizing problems vertically in their mind. They even move their pointer finger as they borrow and carry. Figuring out the bill, sale prices, and total of a string of numbers is something that many struggle with. Unfortunately, a foundation built on rote memorization and procedures instead of conceptual understanding results in an inability to compute mentally with ease.
Reason 2
The fact that some parents cannot figure out what their elementary child’s math classwork is asking them to do, even if they were not taught that way, is further evidence that they have large gaps in their own mathematical understanding. As I said, bad worksheets exempted, if a parent is struggling to understand:
why repeated subtraction might be used to teach division
why making tens might be used when adding or multiplying 9s
why the associative and distributive properties are taught for multiplication
they should hope that their child will be more competent in math than they are because we all want better for our kids than what we got right?
Reason 3
As I briefly mentioned schools used to rely on rote memorization and procedures for mathematical instruction. This is a bad practice. Simply, requiring students to memorize the facts with flashcards does not help to grow their understanding of math it only tests their memory. There are many people who don’t have the best visual or auditory memory but are in fact quite intelligent. Instead of relying on memory we should want kids to actually understand what they’re doing. I recall my 2nd grade teacher telling us that one number had to go to his neighbor’s house to borrow a cup of sugar while teaching subtraction. This was quite confusing. Instead of making abstract analogies teachers need to rely on actually teaching the base 10 system and relationships between numbers.
Reason 4
I grew up not feeling confident in math and having major gaps in my knowledge. When I got to geometry in high school I barely passed even though I received As in math up to that point. This is the case for far too many students. I also needed to take remedial math (without credits) in college because of how I performed on the entrance test despite graduating high school with a high GPA. I recently talked to a mom whose son graduated valedictorian and had to take remedial math in college. If I had any doubts about my own abilities, that solidified that it wasn’t me it was the education.
Typically, elementary teachers were the kids who loved to read, write, and play school. They only received one methods course in math for teaching and now they are relying on a textbook to tell them how to teach the math they don’t understand all that well themselves.
On the contrary, high school math teachers are mathematicians who received almost no training on best teaching practices. There is a major disconnect here. The elementary teachers are experts in children with limited math knowledge and the secondary level teachers are experts in math but not in good teaching.
Now, of course I’m over generalizing but this is often the truth which leaves our kids struggling. The shift in what good math teaching looks like is requiring elementary teachers to learn their content and receive professional development in this area. It is in fact, growing their knowledge and ability to teach math.
Reason 5
Learning math should be fun! These are common phrases associated with elementary math instruction:
Drill and kill
Know your facts
Memorize your facts
Flashcards
Math Minutes
None of these phrases conjure up fun. Math is actually amazing to the point of seeming like magic at times. When you find patterns in the multiplication tables or on a 100 chart it can seem magical. Unfortunately, instead of having students investigate the reason for these patterns they are taught as tricks such as the 9x trick. We want our kids to find math magical but then seek out the answers to demystify and develop meaning. Chalking it up to a trick is irresponsible teaching. Searching for patterns, discussing the many different ways to solve a problem and discovering a new method this is intriguing and fun.
The kids in my class love math because of my attitude and approach towards it. So, instead of getting frustrated when something is foreign to us and calling it dumb let’s try to realize the rationale behind the shift and get behind it. We want better for our kids and we know that math is not a common area of ease for many adults so yes, it needs to improve. If your kids’ school is relying on a bad textbook and workbook to teach you have my blessing to call it dumb but hopefully, this info has made you come around to the idea that the old way was not fine and a new way was needed.