I defer to your years of teaching experience, but I want to bring up one
small counterexample gleaned from helping my son's grade 7 math homework.
My point being that the way math is taught now can be better than the way
it was taught when I was in school all those many years ago.
The problem is to convert a repeating decimal into a fraction, e.g.
0.624242424 ... I was taught how to do this in Mr. Feng's Grade 10 class.
It was described as an algorithm without explanation of why it worked. (I
figured out why it worked when I got to university.) The following is how
it is taught in grade 7:
Let x=0.6242424 ... . Multiply x by 100 and subtract x,
100 x 62.4242424 ...
x 0.6242424 ...
----- --------------
99 x 61.8
So 99 x = 61.8. Divide both sides by 99 and you get x=61.8%99 . Simplify
and you get x=103r165.
At this point the grade 7s have not yet been taught algebra, but have been
working with fractions and decimals a lot. I see this as a good and
natural introduction to algebra. This is a standard grade 7 class using a
standard math text.
On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 7:35 PM, Linda Alvord <[email protected]>wrote:
> Pardon my cynicism, but there is little hope of introducing your plan by
> the
> fifth grade in traditional schools. A creative and experimental teacher
> might pull it off in one experimental classroom. You'll be lucky to
> introduce *: in J in the tradition mathematics program by the fifth grade
> in the next decade.
>
> Linda
>
> Ps. Maybe I'll have a brighter outlook in the morning. It's not that the
> children can't cope. It's the design of the texts, the fear of teachers
> about change, the testing programs to evaluate teachers and students, the
> parents who don't understand what the children are learning and on and
> on....
>
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