by Sarah Lonberg-Lew<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the Adult Numeracy Center at AV巴士<\/a>, we are big fans of the work of Stanford Professor Dr. Jo Boaler. Dr. Boaler has taken the groundbreaking work of psychologist Carol Dweck<\/a> on \u201cmindset\u201d and built an organization aimed at revolutionizing the way math is taught. Her organization, YouCubed.org<\/a>, promotes teaching math as an open, visual, creative subject, focusing on building strong conceptual understanding over ability to reproduce procedures quickly. Most importantly, YouCubed encourages math educators to work to cultivate a \u201cgrowth mindset\u201d in their students. Simply put, a growth mindset means the awareness that the brain can grow. With hard work and conceptually rich experiences, our brains can become better at math \u2013 something many people believe is not possible for them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dr. Boaler ends emails to YouCube\u2019s subscribers with the\nwords, \u201cViva la revolution\u201d because this really is a revolutionary approach to\nmath education, and in our own little corner of the math education world, we at\nthe Adult Numeracy Center are a part of it. Many of our adult learners have been\nvery hurt by a traditional approach to math education that focuses on speed and\nability to memorize \u2013 and conflates those qualities with intelligence. They\ndeserve a chance to realize their own mathematical potential and to reclaim\nwhat it means to be smart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I recently had a conversation with another teacher about the distressing idea that attempts at math education reform have been going on for decades and that they are always met with resistance from teachers and parents. Ultimately, each new reform attempt fades away, only to be replaced with the next. People still talk derisively about the \u201cnew math\u201d of the 1960s and how it took \u201ceasy\u201d procedures for computation and made them unnecessarily complicated with the aim of having students understand why they were doing what they were doing and not just how to do it. One strategy for achieving this was to teach students to calculate in different bases (like base 2 or base 8) in the hopes that that would help them develop a really deep understanding of numbers and operations. This meant students were doing math that looked like nonsense to people who had learned \u201cthe old way\u201d and was met with frustration by parents who could not make sense of their children\u2019s homework. The things people said about the new math sounded very similar to the complaints about math education flooding the internet today. (See Tom Lehrer\u2019s satire on the new math (below) and ask yourself if today\u2019s parents and teachers could have written it!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n