![]() ![]() This tug of war - between traditionalists and reformists, between calculations and big-picture thinking - would repeat itself many times, as Alan H. But parents and teachers balked at this “ New Math,” leading to a return to, more or less, a pre- Sputnik curriculum. to infuse its math instruction with an emphasis on conceptual understanding. ![]() ![]() (Calculus, which a few decades ago was virtually never offered in high school, is now widely perceived as necessary for admission to elite colleges.) In 1957, the Soviet Union’s launch of the satellite Sputnik prompted the U.S. Math education in America today follows a sequence that has been in place since roughly the Cold War: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, a second year of algebra and trigonometry, then pre-calculus. It was the early ’90s, and the math wars were alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic. Convinced that math class was in need of a transformation, she pursued a master’s, then a Ph.D., in mathematics education at King’s College London. “Both she and I had been told we were not good enough for the quantitative subjects we were studying - and it was not true for either of us,” she would later write. “In those moments, I decided I would just teach the higher-level maths.” She talked the administration into letting her students take the harder test, she said, and they passed.īoaler would never forget the girl who wanted to give up. “This girl says to me, ‘Why should we bother?’ And I didn’t really know how to answer that,” Boaler said. Her class of 13-year-olds, who had been assigned to take the lower-level exam, felt defeated from the outset. Fresh off earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Liverpool and thinking she would end up an educational psychologist, she taught math in central London. She still remembers her teacher apologizing in front of her friends for underestimating her.Ī few years later, Boaler saw firsthand that telling students they were incapable was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her mother intervened, arguing for her to take the higher-level exam, and Boaler ended up with the highest grade in the class, she said. In preparation for a national physics test, a male instructor told her that she and the other girls should practice on a lower-level version, which would cap how high they could score. “It was more interesting than I thought.” “Suddenly, the subject was really different,” Boaler recalled. Math was rote and procedural until Boaler had a different kind of teacher, one who wore dangly earrings against school rules and encouraged her teenagers to discuss problems in groups. She went to school and grew up outside of Birmingham, England, where she was raised by her mother, a secretary, and her father, a technical drawer. “If you are not getting pushback, you are probably not being disruptive enough.”īoaler was always a good math student, but she didn’t always like math class. “When doing the work of the warrior, it is important to remember this: You should expect and even welcome pushback,” she has written. Their resistance is merely an invitation to keep marching. “Viva la Maths Revolution!” she often declares.īut Boaler can’t shake her critics, whom she sees as elite gatekeepers standing in the way of better lives for young people. Some of the document’s key ideas are already reshaping math class, as well as admissions at some of the nation’s most selective colleges, much to Boaler’s delight. It is expected to shape instruction not only in the Golden State - which flounders in math, despite being home to Silicon Valley - but also the rest of the country, which struggles with it, too. In pursuit of that goal, Boaler is helping draft California’s latest math framework, a nonbinding guide for how public schools in the most populous state should teach math. She has at times misinterpreted studies and made bold assertions with scant evidence, experts say, empowering skeptics who fear that her proposals would water down math and actually undermine her goal of a more equitable education system. To the K-12 teachers who agree that math isn’t just for “math people,” that memorizing times tables should be replaced with real-world problem-solving, the Stanford professor is a “beacon of hope,” as one educator put it. Boaler is fighting for what she calls a more inclusive way of teaching, armed with influential research. Welcome to America’s knock-down, drag-out math wars. ![]()
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