Rick Froman wrote:
Christopher also wrote:
"The constructivist method seems to be failing badly in the school district featured
in the article, even with students whose parrents are mathematically sophisticated.
That's got to be a bad sign for virtually everywhere else."
Where was the evidence that it was "failing badly"? It didn't even seem to be
failing given the test scores, etc. After 12 paragraphs of anecdotes about how bad it
was, there were these two paragraphs of actual data:
Believe what you will. When a group of educated, mathematically
sophisticated parents say that their children are not learning even
basic mathematical skills, and the school board's response is to dismiss
them as being "too involved" in their children's educations (read:
"watching what we do carefully and not being intimidated by our status
as 'professional educators'"), the "gradual" (read: "small") rise in
test scores back to the level of several years ago impresses me not.
(On top of the fact that I think it is plain silly to expect each
student to effectively recapitulate the entire history of mathematics by
themselves in the course of a basic public education.)
Regards,
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo
Office: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164
Fax: 416-736-5814
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