Is an armistice looming in the "math wars"? Perhaps so. Executives at Texas Instruments recently gathered a number of math experts together for a meeting of both sides, and participants surprised themselves by agreeing on a number of basic principles for math education, including avoiding heavy calculator use in the elementary grades, requiring students to memorize the basic number facts, and mastering the basic algorithms for subtraction, addition, and other fundamental operations. Let's hope somebody tells the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. We're especially thrilled to hear of this agreement, since these principles track the conclusions of the forthcoming Fordham evaluation of state math standards, which will be released just after New Year's. (In fact, two of the participants in the meeting, Wilfried Schmid of Harvard and W. Stephen Wilson of Johns Hopkins, served as reviewers for the Fordham study, which will draw some tough conclusions about the state of K-12 standards in math.) In the end, all the participants agreed that knowledgeable teachers are everything in K-12 math education. "All the [curriculum] can do in the best case is be correct, efficient, and accessible," said Schmid. "Then it is up to the teacher."
"Math educators find common denominators," by Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, December 21, 2004