Reply to Is there a benefit to teaching “old math”?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Oh wow, on paper I do old math, but I’ve always done the new style in my head. That’s really neat!

I think whichever way works best with your learning/processing style is great. Happy like to hear that they’re teaching both.[/quote]

Same. Old math on paper is convenient when I don't feel like thinking or am tired and want to make sure I get it right, but the vast majority of time I do math in my head using approaches that are more similar to new math techniques (but were never explicitly taught in my day that I recall, just intuitively understood that for example it's easier to mentally break 47x82 into three quick/easy problems of 40x80, 7x80, 47x2, and add the result... or just do 50x80 if I need an approximate value)[/quote]

I think this is true for a lot of people.

The hazards with the "teach everything" approach are threefold:

1. Kids who get math really quickly and can intuit whys and concepts are bored unless they are on an accelerated math track where they learn every way of doing it super fast.
2. Kids who have a math or learning or processing related disability can often get confused by 3 different ways to do everything and would do much better really focusing in on just one way of doing it...and that should probably be the fastest and surest.
3. Poor teachers don't typically spend the time necessary to connect the different ways of doing things together or make sure the kids actually understand each way. They just throw out a menu of options - or worse have the kids do a "project" and teach each other the options - and hope one sticks. It leaves the less strong math students behind. This is NOT a problem with good teachers, but if every teacher were amazing we'd have a lot fewer problems.[/quote]

I'm just going to point out for all the advocates of "old math" because it was faster and the new math has kids who already get it bored... Hate to break it to you but the kids who get it quickly were STILL bored back in the day, because we STILL spent time doing "old math" over and over and over again when we didn't need to. [/quote]

True story.
Teaching various ways to approach math is probably a good idea.[/quote]

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