I had a Cub Scout Den meeting tonight and had to pick up one of the Scout before the meeting. There wasn’t any school today so I had no access to the school to hold the meeting, so I had it here at my place. This particular Scout goes to a local private school, so he had a little homework and, amazingly, he wanted to get it done since there were only 4 problems and he figured he could get them done before the meeting started.
We got back to the house and he settled in to work on his problems. The boy and I got ready for the meeting and when I came back down, his friend asked me if I could help him with his homework. So here’s the first of 4 problems he’s working on:
Which of the following helps you solve 35 + 16?
- Think of 16 as 10 + 6
- Think of 16 as 8 + 8
- Think of 35 as 40 – 5 Explain your answer:
35 + 16 = ?
I had to look at this a bit to figure out what the heck was going on, it was understandable that the boy’s friend was having trouble with. After looking at it a bit, then squinting at it and looking at it from some other angles, I figured this is how they make math have “no wrong answers.”
To the Scout’s credit, he new the answer. To the math part that is. So, trying to help him answer the homework question, I asked him how he figured it out. He said “I just added to two number together…” The sheepishness in his voice was a nice touch.
The fact is, this type of thinking needlessly complicates math. It was clear that the Scout was having trouble with the concept of substitution. But there was no need to use substitution to solve this problem. For whatever reason, “new math” does a lot of this- complicating simple problems.
My old school mentality will come screaming through here, but the best way to learn addition, is to do addition. That means know all the single digit problems, then teaching carrying. Learn single digit subtraction, then teach borrowing. Give them practice word problems. Boom. Done.
The boy has been coming home with dots and “fast tens” and “fast doubles” and “doubles +1” all these terms that allegedly help the kids learn how to add. But what does it teach? The idea behind “doubles +1” is for a problem like “8+7”, the student is supposed to think, “Well, 7+7 is 14, plus 1 is 15.” Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?
Happily, I can say “No.”
We ran out of time for finishing his homework. After the meeting ended, when his father showed up, I explained what we were doing. The father, who teaches accounting, rolled his eyes and said something to the effect “Yeah, that’s the ‘New Math’…” At which point, one of the Mom’s nearby, who teaches science, overheard and said “Oh my God, it’s ridiculous. Their coming home with dots and games and spinning things… why can’t they just learn the math?” At which point, another father, who is a pilot, jumped into the conversation rolling his eyes about these new teaching methods.
After all, it’s not like any of us were able to figure out math…