I found this article so interesting! It was originally published in the NEA’s own journal in 1935. Basically, a New York superintendent got permission to try a revolutionary experiment to try to improve the terrible math skills of his students. He got permission to virtually abandon all formal math instruction in the first 6 years of school in 5 classrooms. Instead of teaching drills, memorization and “pencil work,” he had his teachers concentrate on his “new 3-R’s” — to read, to reason and to recite.
He writes:
The children in these rooms were encouraged to do a great deal of oral composition. They reported on books that they had read, on incidents which they had seen, on visits that they had made. They told the stories of movies that they had attended and they made up romances on the spur of the moment. It was refreshing to go into one of these rooms. A happy and joyous spirit pervaded them. The children were no longer under the restraint of learning multiplication tables or struggling with long division. They were thoroughly enjoying their hours in school.
He had the teachers work on measurements and problem solving with the students– estimating distances and the like. Not only did he find kids who were enjoying school more in his new classrooms, but they became much better at reasoning in the absence of math lessons.
The results of his experiments are really astounding. I really related to the fact that the traditionally schooled kids kept trying to figure out how to squash numbers together to get an answer to a word problem (multiply this by this? Or maybe add this and this and this?) without understanding the nature of the problem, so they were never able to solve them. The kids who had not been formally taught math tackled the problem itself and quite easily figured out the answers.
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