Math: Facing an American Phobia

Rating:
Summary: Funny and insightful. Reminds me of my own math experience..
Review: Marilyn Burns offers a humerous and accurate synopsis of mathematics and they way it has been taught throughout the years. She uncovers the reasons for adult phobias and poor attitudes towards math. This book will help you avoid those pitfalls when teaching math today. It is a good book for educators and parents alike.

Rating:
Summary: A must for parents or teachers of K-8 grade children.
Review: This book gives teachers and parents a glimps at what mathematics is all about. Mathematics is useful, necessary, and enjoyable. Marilyn Burns takes common topics found in the elementary and middle grades and shows how they are useful and even necessary in daily life. Although I think the last chapter on mathematics phobia is weak, this chapter still highlights some startling statistics and the need for everyone to rethink their own level of mathematics literacy.

This is an easy reading book that should help parents understand the trends in mathematics education and give ideas how to help their children to enjoy mathematics rather than the situation where children hate mathematics.

Rating:
Summary: Teachers ¿ recommend this book for your parents !
Review: What if you were teaching children how to play basketball. "Imagine that for the first year, you teach them to dribble and they practice only that. The next year, you move on to passing and catching the ball. The next year is devoted exclusively to learning how to shoot baskets. Then you concentrate on the rules of the game, assigning lots of worksheet exercises, which the children complete while seated at desks, working along, and not talking to each other."

That would surely be a "hard" class, with lots of dropouts. But even with its rigor, I nevertheless, still wouldn't expect it to produce a Shaq or an Iverson. For that matter I'm not sure it would actually produce basketball players at all. Neither does Marilyn Burns, in this wonderful book, as she cites this example of a "ridiculous" way to learn basketball and matches it to the way that so many of us were taught mathematics. We can chuckle at the example - but for many it is a nervous chuckle, indeed.

Most of us grew up to be neither basketball stars nor mathematicians - nor even adequate users of mathematics in our lives - and to be desperately resistant to revisiting any part of our mathematical upbringing.. As a 6th grade math teacher, I know this too well. At a party I can find as little company as the proctologists once conversation has turned to professions. On "Parents' Night" the easiest way to clear the room is to hint that we might all "try some examples" of what the students will be doing in the year.

This "phobia" seems also to be the basis for the immense friction that efforts to reform mathematics have faced in the past decade. Approaches that favor students actively engaging in math, talking to each other, (talking to parents!), responding to open-ended problems and creating algorithms are just so alien that they have faced fierce resistance. Many Americans are as eager to "just get through" their children's school mathematics experience as they were to survive their own. Any attempt to elaborate or reposition the subject (especially to engage them in new approaches) is, for them, just delaying early parole from their child's sentence to "serve" 8-12 years. Like any neurosis, this phobia has enervated some and produced mathematical cripples; but it has also energized others whose sense of overcoming math as an obstacle informs their own sense of the nature of "success."

Burns knows this from more than a decade of working, through her "Math Solutions" project, training tens-of-thousands of pre-service and active teachers in new approaches to their classrooms. She is well known in math education circles for her "Math By All Means" series: which included books with refreshingly new models for teaching 'core' topics such as division in grades 3 and 4 as well as unheard of topics such as probability in elementary classrooms. She has since branched into a growing collection of books aimed to directly engage and intrigue kids, as well as more books aimed at bolstering the uncertainty of many teachers who face new challenges but sense the roots of the math phobia in their own lives.

I believe this book is her book for parents. Burns commences with a warm chapter discussing the central national mathematics ritual of the year - the production of the perfect Thanksgiving Turkey. Who knew it to include so much math? Or, as Burns dryly wonders, to have driven the market to produce the "pop-up" turkey to let the math phobics off the hook! From there she moves to discuss everything from the role of calculators and testing to specific 'topics' (teaching fractions and percents), to a general retrospective on "Math then and now" and a prospective look at solving the phobia problem.

Burns seems well aware of the difficult fact that the math phobia will, itself, deter many adults from even a glance at this book. It is surely by design that it is a slender and un-intimidating volume, sprinkled with clear illustrations and quite a few examples of student's work. Along the way, it scatters seven less-than-traditional math problems through the chapters and ends with a chapter entitled "Not your everyday answer key."

Its odd that in a culture swamped with self-help books, where folks will line up, unflinchingly, to purchase books about surviving depression or abusive relationships. I find it hard to imagine many math "phobics" marching to the cash register with this book in hand (perhaps, thus, more saleable through an online venue). Burns is not one to proffer deep analysis for such troubled folks. Instead she offers a chuckle and a hand for a short walk through a place where math is engaging enough to almost be... fun; a place where our children are exploring every day; a place where the challenges of the 21st century won't be faced with the intellectual tools of the 19th.

Buy this book for yourself. Buy a pass-around copy for friends who can't seem to get past grousing about the "new, new" math. Buy one for the members of your school board and the principal in your child's elementary school. Buy a sympathy copy to anyone you see worrying the pages of one of E.D. Hirsch's "What your nth=Grader Needs to Know" tomes. What they, and we, really need to know is how to think. This book is a good starting point.

Rating:
Summary: Teachers ? recommend this book for your parents !
Review: What if you were teaching children how to play basketball. "Imagine that for the first year, you teach them to dribble and they practice only that. The next year, you move on to passing and catching the ball. The next year is devoted exclusively to learning how to shoot baskets. Then you concentrate on the rules of the game, assigning lots of worksheet exercises, which the children complete while seated at desks, working along, and not talking to each other."

That would surely be a "hard" class, with lots of dropouts. But even with its rigor, I nevertheless, still wouldn't expect it to produce a Shaq or an Iverson. For that matter I'm not sure it would actually produce basketball players at all. Neither does Marilyn Burns, in this wonderful book, as she cites this example of a "ridiculous" way to learn basketball and matches it to the way that so many of us were taught mathematics. We can chuckle at the example - but for many it is a nervous chuckle, indeed.

Most of us grew up to be neither basketball stars nor mathematicians - nor even adequate users of mathematics in our lives - and to be desperately resistant to revisiting any part of our mathematical upbringing.. As a 6th grade math teacher, I know this too well. At a party I can find as little company as the proctologists once conversation has turned to professions. On "Parents' Night" the easiest way to clear the room is to hint that we might all "try some examples" of what the students will be doing in the year.

This "phobia" seems also to be the basis for the immense friction that efforts to reform mathematics have faced in the past decade. Approaches that favor students actively engaging in math, talking to each other, (talking to parents!), responding to open-ended problems and creating algorithms are just so alien that they have faced fierce resistance. Many Americans are as eager to "just get through" their children's school mathematics experience as they were to survive their own. Any attempt to elaborate or reposition the subject (especially to engage them in new approaches) is, for them, just delaying early parole from their child's sentence to "serve" 8-12 years. Like any neurosis, this phobia has enervated some and produced mathematical cripples; but it has also energized others whose sense of overcoming math as an obstacle informs their own sense of the nature of "success."

Burns knows this from more than a decade of working, through her "Math Solutions" project, training tens-of-thousands of pre-service and active teachers in new approaches to their classrooms. She is well known in math education circles for her "Math By All Means" series: which included books with refreshingly new models for teaching `core' topics such as division in grades 3 and 4 as well as unheard of topics such as probability in elementary classrooms. She has since branched into a growing collection of books aimed to directly engage and intrigue kids, as well as more books aimed at bolstering the uncertainty of many teachers who face new challenges but sense the roots of the math phobia in their own lives.

I believe this book is her book for parents. Burns commences with a warm chapter discussing the central national mathematics ritual of the year - the production of the perfect Thanksgiving Turkey. Who knew it to include so much math? Or, as Burns dryly wonders, to have driven the market to produce the "pop-up" turkey to let the math phobics off the hook! From there she moves to discuss everything from the role of calculators and testing to specific `topics' (teaching fractions and percents), to a general retrospective on "Math then and now" and a prospective look at solving the phobia problem.

Burns seems well aware of the difficult fact that the math phobia will, itself, deter many adults from even a glance at this book. It is surely by design that it is a slender and un-intimidating volume, sprinkled with clear illustrations and quite a few examples of student's work. Along the way, it scatters seven less-than-traditional math problems through the chapters and ends with a chapter entitled "Not your everyday answer key."

Its odd that in a culture swamped with self-help books, where folks will line up, unflinchingly, to purchase books about surviving depression or abusive relationships. I find it hard to imagine many math "phobics" marching to the cash register with this book in hand (perhaps, thus, more saleable through an online venue). Burns is not one to proffer deep analysis for such troubled folks. Instead she offers a chuckle and a hand for a short walk through a place where math is engaging enough to almost be... fun; a place where our children are exploring every day; a place where the challenges of the 21st century won't be faced with the intellectual tools of the 19th.

Buy this book for yourself. Buy a pass-around copy for friends who can't seem to get past grousing about the "new, new" math. Buy one for the members of your school board and the principal in your child's elementary school. Buy a sympathy copy to anyone you see worrying the pages of one of E.D. Hirsch's "What your nth=Grader Needs to Know" tomes. What they, and we, really need to know is how to think. This book is a good starting point.