Schools fail because we sabotage kids

"Why schools fail: a view from a college professor" (Opinion Exchange, Oct. 23) was an enlightening piece. I'd like to pass on my experience with the narrower topic of mathematics in the public schools. I am an engineer and have used math as a tool for decades. Algebra, geometry and trigonometry (A/G/T) were my mainstays.

Though my involvement may be a bit dated, I saw the signs of coming troubles in math education some 30 years ago, when I had the opportunity to help a student from my church with some basic algebra. Word got around and demand increased to the point that I set up a "homework helper" room at home.

That led me into a 25-year "career" of tutoring A/G/T. I was happy that I could help nearly 50 students.

High school math had been hard for me when I was in school. I had to work out alternative methods of doing the math; alternative approaches to framing problems. The advantage this gave me in tutoring was in my unique ways of approaching math problems or visualizing geometric analogues. All these "tricks" stood me well in helping students, many of whom had the same difficulties I did. If they didn't grasp the solution using one explanation, I had alternatives, one of which often worked for them.

It is important to note that the students I worked with were mostly white, suburban kids from affluent neighborhoods. Yet as I started working with these students, one thing became apparent to me. Many could not do arithmetic. I had high school juniors who could not divide by 10 in their heads. They immediately reached for their calculators, even for simple addition or multiplication operations. And these were bright kids.

You can only imagine how reliance on that technology slowed them down in doing their homework. And the error rate in entering numbers was alarming. Furthermore, this was raising their frustration enormously. I realized that by handing students a calculator in fourth grade we were sabotaging their math skills, fostering a dependency on technology. Of course, they had learned their basic math facts and passed tests, but they quickly unlearned them.

As an experiment, I began taking away my students' calculators, demanding they do their basic arithmetic in their heads. After two months of mental math (accompanied by grousing and kvetching) they found they could get their homework done in half the time, more accurately. This became my standard procedure thereafter.

Another thing I focused on was "housekeeping" — laying out succeeding operations in a logical (and neat) array, line by line. To me this was critical in tracking the solution process and, more importantly, being able to backtrack to find the source of errors. This led to more whining, but eventually they saw the benefits of working methodically.

In other words, they developed that "grit" referred to by Prof. David Schultz in his commentary.

It was in the 1990s when "mushy" math (along with companion reading schemes) came to the fore in school curriculum. To me, this was like Zen mathematics, where instead of performing numerical operations, students were supposed to intuit the nature of the problem and work their way to a solution. Worse, I found their textbooks (if they were even issued textbooks) offered no example problems; no clues as to how to approach the problems. The students would state that "this was explained in class." The problem was that neither the tutor (nor the parent) was in the classroom to hear the explanation.

Pity the poor parent who was trying to help a child. In some cases, I had to specifically request that my students be given a textbook we could work from (for all the good it did us — they were quite unintelligible).

Now, enter the new millennium. Enter the tablet. Exeunt paper and pencil. The last student I worked with, I believe a ninth-grader, had her textbook, math assignment and homework all on her tablet. To find a relevant section to clarify a point, one had to scroll backward 20 or 30 pages. Then one had to remember what the instruction looked like while scrolling the 30 pages forward to work on that problem. I couldn't do it. My student was smarter than I (or at least more acculturated to this process) and managed somehow to work with this. But it would take forever. Then the math was executed on the tablet screen using a fingertip to write in the equations and the operations. This led to an illegible scrawl that somehow the student was able to interpret. So much for housekeeping.

I resorted to printing sheets of sample problems from the web and providing lined paper, pencil and eraser. But, for me, that was the last straw. I threw in my metaphorical math towel and left it to teachers with the expertise (and fortitude) to work with this.

It's been 10 years since I "retired." I'm convinced the problems we are seeing today are a result of these early insidious shifts in teaching methods. Don't even get me started on the lattice method of long division.

Math in the public schools is a microcosm of the intellectual miasma we have created for our children. We have curriculum defined by the book publishers and mandatory hardware created by the technology sector. We foist curriculum experiments on our kids so the academics can test their pet theories. We demand that teachers use these "resources" and that their teaching hew to the party line. We sabotage our kids early on with technology.

And the worst; we don't make our kids do the hard mental work; developing the true grit needed for success.

Harald Eriksen lives in Brooklyn Park.