New Math & Arithmetic

New Math in Vincent’s own classroom

In Whatever Happened to Arithmetic?, Vincent describes teaching New Math for three years early in his career. He writes about his school district’s adoption of a New Math program, its later replacement with a more traditional program, and the way teachers continued using number facts to supplement instruction.

The essay develops one of the central ideas behind The Silent Voice in Education: classroom teachers often relied on their own experience and judgment even when the official curriculum pointed them in another direction.

Arithmetic, math facts, and teacher judgment

In his second math essay, Vincent argues that repetition and reinforcement of math facts gave students confidence with basic operations and helped prepare them for algebra. He also describes his own decision to add multiplication facts to New Math instruction and presents that kind of teacher-led supplementation as an example of the “silent voice” in education.

Across both essays, the subject is not only mathematics. It is also the role of the classroom teacher: what teachers observed, what they believed students needed, and what they did when their professional judgment differed from the program they had been given.

How it connects to the book

The Silent Voice in Education examines how classroom teachers became less influential in decisions shaping their classrooms. Vincent’s writing about New Math is one of his clearest examples of that larger argument.

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