Math Problems ("A Mom Becomes a Math Maverick")

Letter to the Editor
Our Town (Manhattan Media, LLC)
November 28, 2002

To the Editor:

Helen Chernikoff's article ("A Mom Becomes a Math Maverick", Nov. 21) describes the fight of Elizabeth Carson and the NYC HOLD organization to restore content in mathematics instruction in District 2 schools.

I would like to add a few words about the district-wide curricular mandates in mathematics.

The article focusses on the TERC curriculum, mandated for grade school, and the reader may want to see the NYC HOLD Web page (www.nychold.com) for a pointer to an annotated collection of critical reviews and commentary on that curriculum. There are links there to reviews by Mathematically Correct, by Dr. William Quirk, and by Professor Stanley Ocken, among others. Bill Quirk and Stanley Ocken are both with NYC HOLD.

In middle school, the mandated curriculum is CMP, Connected Mathematics Project, and there are several reviews of that curriculum linked through the NYC HOLD Web page, as well. In high school the curriculum is Mathematics Modelling Our World, by the ARISE consortium. It belongs to the same reform tradition as TERC and CMP, but it is unfortunately not yet reviewed on the NYC HOLD pages.

I don't know if District 2 is the only NYC district that imposes the mathematics curriculum all the way from grade school through high school, but certainly such mandates are not the norm, and a superintendent who imposes a mathematics curriculum district-wide in the face of broad opposition from mathematicians must be truly confident about his or her mathematical judgment. The superintendent of District 2 is Dr. Shelley Harwayne, and she has written some words about mathematics instruction. I quote from her book "Going Public: Priorities and Practice at the Manhattan New School" (Heinemann, 1999).

"Our students seem so at home renaming numbers, seeing patterns in hundreds charts, and performing great amounts of mental math. With deep-rooted number sense and little attention to algorithms, our students understand how knowing that 6 x 7 = 42 helps you to know what 60 x 70 is, what 12 x 7 is, what 3 x 7 is, and so on."

"Unfortunately to date, I have remained more of a spectator than a participant in math workshops, but I'm present enough to realize just how limited I am. I have had very little personal experience in performing mental mathematics, cooperatively solving mathematical problems, and appreciating other people's strategies for solving problems. I have had no experience in creating math menus, teaching replacement units, or providing manipulatives. The teaching of mathematics keeps me particularly humble. I realize just how little I know and how much there is to learn."

There is more in my Web article "Shelley Harwayne and Mathematics," which is linked from the NYC HOLD page. I conclude there that with a superintendent so ignorant of mathematics beyond the grade school level, the District would do well to refrain from imposing mathematics curriculum and should leave the choice to the better judgment of schools and teachers.

Bas Braams
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University

Addendum to the published letter.

Please see also the author's education Web page: Links, Articles, Essays, and Opinions on K-12 Education; and the NYC HOLD Web page. The curriculum reviews referenced above are Reviews of TERC: Investigations in Number, Data, and Space and Reviews of CMP: Connected Mathematics Project. A third link, Reviews of COMAP's Mathematics: Modeling Our World, is in progress.