Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Savvy, practical insights on where our Education Establishment went wrong and how most schools can be improved.LET'S FIX EDUCATION explains the many dysfunctional theories and methods operating within our schools. This podcast is intended for parents, teachers, and community leaders who want education reform.
Each week, LET'S FIX EDUCATION examines another problem in our public schools, such as: Constructivism. Learning styles. Sight-words. No memorization. Cooperative learning. Prior knowledge. Reform math. The dilution of knowledge. Common Core. Project-based learning. Student-centered, etc. In fact, there are DOZENS of counterproductive learning and teaching theories, all made worse by ideological motives.
Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, and education reformer. He has analyzed the problems in education for more than 30 years. Price is the author of "Saving K-12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" (190 pages) His main education site is Improve-Education.org. For more information about book and author, visit Lit4u.com. Newest novels are "Frankie" (about a harmless robot) and "The Boy Who Saves The World" (about a boy who saves the world).
"Bruce Price’s SAVING K-12 is a MUST read! It is precise, concise and powerful. Action is required…for the sake of our children, our grandchildren and the future of the American Republic!” Robert W. Sweet, Jr., long-time President of The National Right to Read Foundation
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 101: Can you stand the truth about Mutant Math? (Wednesday, June 7, 2023}
Episode 101: Can you stand the truth about Mutant Math?
Deep-down you probably can't accept the thought that there are people intentionally sabotaging American children. But there are.
They teach math in ways guaranteed to make sure children don't know much math. I quickly explain five of the worst gimmicks. Once you know them, you can help get them out of the schools.
----------- ------- --------
The best video on what's wrong with math is called An Inconvenient Truth. It's worth 15 minutes of your time because then you'll know what's been done to the country. (The Lattice Method is explained at minute 5:00.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The best way to understand problems in public schools
is to read: Saving K-12
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
----------------------------------------------------------------
New novel: Art and Beauty.
Crime fiction. Set in Manhattan.
Dangerously well written.
Published by Web-E-Books /// Editor says: “Bruce Deitrick Price puts
a new spin on the all-American, sexy, fast-talking detective story by creating
a truly fresh crime-fighter personality and placing his original P.I. character, Jon Dak, among movers and shakers in the NYC art and fashion world.”
< Enjoy Chapter 1. ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY >
< Enjoy Chapter 2. MISS BABBAGE >
Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in charge prefer mediocrity because they are socialists of one kind or another. If people work together to promote real education, we'll have it.
LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by --- BRUCE DEITRICK PRICE
Episode 101 Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Can you stand the truth about Mutant Math?
Americans students can't seem to solve basic problems that used to be ordinary, such as 23 times 14. Why?
The usual excuse suggests that we have too many things going on. We can't focus on yet another big problem, like inflation, corruption, and climate change.
I think there is something deeper and more profound going on. Here it is. Deep down in your heart you simply don’t believe there are lowlife saboteurs engaged in systematic assault on American students from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This is why you put up with declines in American education. You think it's a fantasy, you think it's some right-wing conspiracy, you think it's aliens leaving their dirty little literary efforts on our collective consciousness.
No ordinary humans could engage in such evil conduct. But they do.
In this short piece I can’t discuss all the absurdities that devastated the school system. I'll mention five. Each of these mutants could by itself destroy a country’s school system.
1.) The quack’s depot of fake math instruction was revealed completely in 1962 when New Math was ushered into being with a monstrous propaganda operation. Everybody in America knew how wonderful New Math was supposed to be. It only took a few months for people to realize it was a hopeless absurdity. They started throwing New Math textbooks in the garbage.
Here is the key sentence from the current Wikipedia article: “Topics introduced in the New Math include set theory, modular arithmetic, algebraic inequalities, bases other than 10, matrices, symbolic logic, Boolean algebra, and abstract algebra.”
Obviously these are not appropriate for elementary school or even middle school or even high school. Ergo an evil mutant put them there.
New Math was much too complex for children who don't know how to add and subtract yet. This is one of the basic dirty tricks. You want to put gasoline in your car but I insist on teaching the chemical properties of gasoline. This gimmick was used all the way through New Math, Reform Math, and now Common Core Math.
2.) The next thing you see is that nobody is expected to memorize anything. The multiplication tables used to be the first thing that children learned. Doing so makes all aspects of arithmetic easier. Now they let the kids struggle until about the fourth grade and then they say, it's OK, kids, here's your first calculator. An intelligent school would not allow calculators until middle school. You want to make the kids feel in control of simple math: adding up the check at a restaurant, figuring out how many tiles you need for the floor, calculating how many minutes are left in the day. The only way is to do simple problems again and again.
3.) Another popular stunt now crippling our schools is to insist that Constructivism be an element of all instruction. That means the children figure out how to answer the problem by themselves and then extrapolate that to a generalized method. Students must teach themselves. If the teacher teaches the kids, that doesn't count. This particular mutant has been summed up in one report as: “Myth #1: Only what students discover for themselves is truly learned.”
In fact, school should teach mastery at all levels; it’s mastery that gives children confidence to go forward.
4.) At the end of this podcast is one of the best videos you can look at: An Inconvenient Truth. At about minute 5, the video goes into the Lattice Method, an alternate way of doing multiplication. It’s difficult and confusing; parents don't know it; few kids ever learn it; and it's not nearly as efficient as the method that most Americans already know.
5.) Nothing shows the spirit of these people better their obsession with Order of Operations. This is a completely new and bogus part of math. Imagine you take a page of English prose and you eliminate all punctuation. Then you tell the kids, OK, decide where periods go, semicolons, question marks, etc. The kids will spend the rest of the week trying to figure what the text intends to say. It's the job of writers and editors to punctuate the text. In the case of math, the writer must put + and - where they need to be, and as well the symbols for multiplication and division.
You can guess even from this brief summary that millions of public school students never learn much as they are stunned and stunted from the first hour. Problem is, our professors of education don't care about education. They care about psychological manipulation and political indoctrination.
ADDENDUM:
An Inconvenient Truth