I was not surprised our students from self-contained classes, that had been eliminated, were doing well in regular 8th grade math class for two reasons. The first one was explained in my previous post. The second one was a result of my experience with research on handedness. Frontal-lobe development in children leads to higher level thinking ability and begins when they are 12-14 years old.
At the time when the research was conducted, the popular belief was that the development continued to 18 years of age. That belief has been extended over the years. Presently it looks like the front-lobe development continues to 25 years of age.
Anyone who has read my article, “Whatever Happened to Arithmetic” understands the dichotomy between Mathematicians and Educator Mathematics. My understanding indicates the New Math programs developed in the 1950s were hurried into publication. It looks like readiness in elementary students from K-5 was not investigated.
In fact, the paragraph in the 2008 report that mentions “ease of operations” seems to ignore the word arithmetic but emphasizes the need to understand math terminology. However, “readiness” to understand math terminology in children younger than 10 years old seems to have been either ignored or never investigated.
It looks like Educator mathematicians of the 1950s made an “age old mistake” of looking at the young children as miniature adults. Some of the early hype regarding new math indicated that children in grade one would be doing algebra.
The exact opposite became truth, students stopped moving up to algebra which in turn resulted in the 2008 Presidential math conference. The need to understand and memorize multiplication facts is the basic building block to learning arithmetic. That’s why I included it as soon as the new math was included in our curricula. And that’s the same reason why other elementary school teachers, including the one interviewed in 2018, added multiplications facts.
Remember one of the first characteristics that new math was the math program of a local school, “the young clerks had a problem counting correct change.”
It certainly looks like frontal-lobe development in children K-5 was not considered. Terminology took the place of repetition and reimbursement with math facts. Arithmetic was the basis for measurement and problem solving for hundreds if not thousands of years.
New math was defended in 2008 when the need to understand math terminology was added to the reason students were not moving up to algebra, “lack of ease of operations.” Lack of frontal-lobe development in children K-5 needed to be investigated as the programs were created in the 1950s.
