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Dan Rockmore, William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science, Associate Dean for the Sciences at Dartmouth College, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute insist, Math curricula are designed to shepherd students toward calculus. Some mathematicians think this path is outdated.
Person Writing On White Board
Photo: Jeswin Thomas from Pexels
Many parents relish reliving moments from our childhoods through our children, and doing homework with them is its own kind of madeleine. For Steve Levitt of "Freakonomics" fame — who is, in his own words, "someone who uses a lot of math in my everyday life" — a trip down memory lane vis-a-vis math homework became a moment of frustrated incredulity rather than gauzy reverie. "Perhaps the single most important development over the last 50 years has been the rise of data and computers, and yet the curriculum my children were learning seemed to have been air-dropped directly from my own childhood," he told me. "I couldn't see anything different about what they were learning than what I learned, even though the world had transformed completely. And that didn't make sense."
Levitt has made a career of questioning the received dogma. In this case, what he saw was that "A mathematical way of thinking, numeracy, data literacy, is far more important today than it has been; the ability to visualize data, the ability to make sense out of a pile of numbers, has never been more important, but you wouldn't know that from looking at the math curriculum." Data combined with the use of mathematical ideas had transformed the way he and others look at the world. Should data also change the way we teach mathematics?
In most schools, children are grounded in basic arithmetic in elementary school, and then, somewhere between middle school and high school, force-fed the "algebra-geometry-algebra sandwich". The first year of algebra ("Algebra I") continues to reinforce basic arithmetic, and then brings in fractions. The familiar starts to give way to the unfamiliar when variables and functions are introduced...
Another piece is a new initiative of Coleman's that the College Board is calling its "pre-AP curriculum". This fall "Pre-AP Geometry with Statistics" is being piloted around the country. It is a quarter the basics of data science with the rest basic geometry. The bridging conceit that both are contexts for deductive reasoning and the course joins the certainties of deduction with the probabilities of data science. A new Pre-AP Algebra II course will also have data analysis connections inserted through the appearance of functions with more than one variable.
Source: Salon
