California Needs a Good Math Curriculum

The April 13th Mercury News opinion piece "Innate interest + practice = math success" missed the mark.

Almost every child has Innate interest in math. Studies show it drops off as kids progress through California schools. California's curriculum stresses skills and practice rather than conceptual learning. Studies show that kids who learn by exploring and discovering learn more deeply and stay with math longer. The rewards of discovery and solving interesting problems in group environments keep math fun and interesting for more kids.

The California math standards specify a rich, detailed set of skills at every grade level. This was done in a painful political process over 10 years ago. Contrary to good math programs where students study 7-12 topics a year and learn them well, the California standards specify learning about one skill a week. Kids learn superficially, drill and then forget, so the next year much of the material needs to be reviewed.

The traditional "skill and drill" approach produces traditional results. Kids do okay on the standard tests but can't apply math to problems in their lives and few go into engineering or the sciences. Only a small percentage of students with great aptitude succeed at math. Most others are turned off. Math is boring, the way we teach it.

Part of this political process was to choose "recommended" elementary school texts. A committee of math educators chose the best books and the board of education threw out the list! Instead, the approved list was filled with only traditional texts.

We need to support better curricula by letting schools use state textbook money for texts of their choice, rather than the current list of texts.

Ideally, we need a good set of state standards. The best approach would be to adopt the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' standards wholesale.

We need to stop teaching to the tests and instead teach so kids learn more deeply, and enjoy learning to use the power of math to solve interesting problems. Children who learn this way do about the same on the tests in the early years, but much better later on.

Real-world math is applied and interesting-- very different from the skills we teach in California. We should start preparing our kids to think deeply about the problems around them, and nurture the thinking skills needed to overcome the problems the future will bring.

-Randy Strauss, Mountain View
Mathematician, Computer Scientist, Math Teacher