Sign Up For Our Newsletter

Letter from "John Dewey"

(This is the first in a series. -ed.) 

By way of introduction, my name is not John Dewey but it will have to do for now.  I am in ed school (night classes) in a state and county that shall remain nameless as shall my state of mind.  I have decided to teach high school math when I retire in five years. I majored in the subject, and have a burning desire to make sure kids learn it correctly. 

I recognize that there are probably more than a few blogs out there that operate on the premise of the anonymous mole in ed school telling all.  So what makes me different? For one, other blogs simply pale in comparison.  For another, no other ed school mole blogs are writing about math.

Math education is in a shambles, starting from the so-called standards put out by the National Council of Mathematics (NCTM) in 1989 and revised in 2000.  These standards were then copied by many states that thought they were great.  State boards of education paid no mind to the shrieks of horror from mathematicians, simply not believing that the resulting standards took the math out of mathematics in the name of fun, and whose approach for eliminating the achievement gap eliminated the mastery of any math knowledge that matters.  The well-intentioned but ill-conceived standards have actually widened the gaps between the rich and the poor by motivating those who can do so to hire tutors for their children, to enroll them in learning centers like Sylvan and Kumon, or to put them in private schools. 

Few refuges exist from the multicolored tomes that adhere to NCTM-based standards posing as math textbooks.  No one is safe from this modern day invasion of the body snatchers.  And just like in the movie, those with the power to do something have already been taken over by the seed pods of ed school dogma.  Those who resist are told that everything they’ve heard is false.  It’s just ideology not fact, they are told, propagated by math professors who are evil seed pods themselves desiring to turn your kids into dull, listless mathematicians like them.  And just to make sure you’re okay with that, they are then told that under these math reform programs at least your kids will learn critical thinking skills.  Oh, good.  Now I feel better.

I exaggerate, just a bit.  Well, no.  I take it back.  I don’t exaggerate at all.  The seed pods who infiltrated NCTM are the same ones who infiltrated the ed schools.  As one mathematician I know puts it, the inmates are running the insane asylum.  Perhaps it started with the original John Dewey, but something tells me if he saw what is going on now he would say, “No, that’s not what I had in mind.  And who was the putz who came up with block scheduling?” 

I am a new breed of warrior that is trying to infiltrate from the inside by actually teaching math as it should be taught.  This means—I am told by teachers getting ready to retire—that I should teach in a private or a charter school.  These teachers have had enough.  They view me in the same way as a well-fed restaurant patron looks at the new customers gorging themselves: “How can they eat when I’m not hungry?”

The seed pod way of thought begins early in ed school.  For me, it began even before my first day of classes.  The short-listed candidates for admission to the grad school of education had to come in for an orientation and interview.  Among the many ed school adages we were told that day was: “The way science and math are taught today is not how you were taught.”  This said with a kind of taunting, challenging quality with some mumbo jumbo thrown in about “inquiry-based” learning.  Another was “The textbook is a resource, not a curriculum.”  From what I hear, this “content doesn’t matter” approach only gets worse. 

I have just finished my first introductory class which though steeped in the various theories of learning that abound, did not require any essays extolling the “content doesn’t matter” philosophy (though you certainly weren’t discouraged from expressing such sentiment).  The course I’m dreading is coming up this fall—a class in teaching methods for math.  The syllabus reads like a promotional brochure for the NCTM standards.

Right now I’m studying for the Praxis II test in mathematics—required for licensure and for graduation.  It is given by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the folks that produce the SAT, GRE and hosts of other standardized tests.  The Praxis II math content test covers algebra through calculus and requires the use of a graphing calculator.  My advisor told me I needed one for the test.  To find out where her sympathies lay, I wrote her an email with my observation that with the increasing use of calculators, the rudiments of math were becoming a lost art.  My advisor replied that there was a time when writing down the plus and minus symbols was considered a "crutch" and that what is "basic" or "fundamental" or "rudimentary" is by no means fixed and never has been.  This is someone with a master’s degree in math.  I was about to ask her if the multiplication facts had changed, and how long had we been using the plus and minus symbols but decided against it.  From what I hear, she’s the one teaching the course I have to take in the fall. 

Until next time, I remain faithfully yours,

John Dewey