Good Teachers … Bad Math??

I was in a store today buying cat food and litter (really!!), and the person in front of me at the check-out did a double take … and he asked if I still taught math.  When I said yes he said “I pass math because of you!!”  (Warm fuzzies?)  At that point, the cashier said “Where was he when I was taking math?”  (Cold pricklies?)

Part of today’s educational climate is the push to evaluate teachers, especially in K-12 settings, partially based on student academic performance.  Those who produce higher levels of improvement, or absolute performance, are rewarded with good evaluations; those who do not produce run the risk of being dismissed.  This obsession with evaluation has not reached colleges (yet), though I am really looking forward to the evaluation system like this for politicians.  Somehow politicians can say “it’s the other guys fault” and get re-elected, while teachers saying “other factors negatively impact learning” gets ignored and then dismissed (if their evaluations are not good enough).

It is far too easy to feel smug when a student says “I passed math because of you”.  Why do people say this?  Is it because the majority of teachers are, well, ‘bad’?  Or, is it because the math involved is so distorted from any reasonable need for one person to know, that we are faced with a random function (input is teacher behavior, output is ‘success’)?    If we are facing this random function, we would observe almost all teachers having a student say “I passed because of you” … and I believe that this is, in fact, the case.

We need to push for good mathematics that people actually need to know.  At the college level, the New Life project is based on this goal.  In the school setting, there is the “Common Core” … however, I believe that the Common Core does NOT describe good mathematics that people need to know.  Instead, the Common Core seems to be a laundry-list of topics and skills that members of a group nominated, without sharing an underlying criteria the discriminate between good math and math that gets in the way.

We also need to work on ‘advancing the profession’.  Too much of our work is based on oral history and local traditions, without a common framework for building methods that support good learning.  The New Life project has a hope of facilitating this community-building, just like the Carnegie Foundations “Networked Improvement Communities” strives to build the profession.

I did, of course, thank the student for the comment about helping him pass the course.  If it wasn’t such a public venue, I normally also comment about their hard work being critical. 

I hope you will join me in building good mathematics and advancing the profession.
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