'Innovative' Math, but Can You Count?

New York Times: "LAST spring, when he was only a sophomore, Jim Munch received a plaque honoring him as top scorer on the high school math team here. He went on to earn the highest mark possible, a 5, on an Advanced Placement exam in calculus. His ambition is to become a theoretical mathematician. So Jim might have seemed the veritable symbol for the new math curriculum installed over the last seven years in this ambitious, educated suburb of Rochester. Since seventh grade, he had been taking the 'constructivist' or 'inquiry' program, so named because it emphasizes pupils' constructing their own knowledge through a process of reasoning.Jim, however, placed the credit elsewhere. His parents, an engineer and an educator, covertly tutored him in traditional math. Several teachers, in the privacy of their own classrooms, contravened the official curriculum to teach the problem-solving formulas that constructivist math denigrates as mindless memorization. 'My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the program,' Jim said recently. 'Whatever I've achieved, I've achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There's a reason we go to school, which is that there's someone smarter than us with something to teach us.'Such experiences and emotions have burst into public discussion and no small amount of rancor in the last eight months in Penfield. This community of 35,000 has become one of the most obvious fronts in the nationwide math wars, which have flared from California to Pittsburgh to the former District 2 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, pitting progressives against traditionalists, with nothing less than America's educational and economic competitiveness at stake.In these places and others, groups of parents have condemned constructivist math for playing down such basic computational tools as borrowing, carrying, place value, algorithms, multiplication tables and long division, while often introducing calculators into the classroom as early as first or second grade. Such criticism has run headlong into the celebration of constructivism by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and such leading teacher-training institutions as the Bank Street College of Education."