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Should elementary schools teach math?

Well, I’m not going to get into if math should be taught in elementary school or not. I think it’s actually the wrong solution to the problem of how to teach math.

the people who teach in elementary schools are not mathematicians. Most of them are math phobic,
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Patricia Clark Kenschaft, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University, described her experiences of going into elementary schools and talking with teachers about math. In one visit to a K-6 elementary school in New Jersey she discovered that not a single teacher, out of the fifty that she met with, knew how to find the area of a rectangle.

This is the problem with math education in elementary schools. No matter the technique used to teach the subject students will develop an aversion to math if they are relying on a math phobic educator to teach them.

For example at the beginning of this year I asked one of my sons’ teachers about the Everyday Math program used in their school. Despite being taught that math curriculum as part of her education degree, and using it for multiple years as an elementary teacher she admitted to being uncomfortable with math in general and that program specifically. Admittedly this was after I admitted my own confusion about the program and asked about math homework being assigned with no context allowing a parent to translate from “Everyday Math” speak to 1970s and ’80s style math.

I’m certainly not math phobic, in fact I’d say I’m quite fond of math. Still trying to teach a young child how to solve “fact triangles” “function machines” and “number models” when you have no idea what they are is only going to reinforce any math phobia the child may have developed in the classroom.

There are certainly positive aspects to the program, and I think math education does have to improve if we want to have a math literate population. The answer is not to slightly change the system in place. A radical change is needed. Either that or we need to make every elementary educator math literate themselves and ensure they teach math with the same joie de vivre as they bring to their other subjects. When transmogrifier technology is perfected we can attempt the second approach. Until then I suggest we attempt the first.

Benezet showed that kids who received just one year of arithmetic, in sixth grade, performed at least as well on standard calculations and much better on story problems than kids who had received several years of arithmetic training.

So that’s a radical change. But in fact that sentence is deceptive. The students studied were introduced to number concepts, they just were not drilled in formal arithmetic programs. This left potentially math phobic teachers to only teach simple math concepts such as counting and measuring. That’s a radical change. I’m not sure I’d actually support it but I certainly want to think more about it.