I’m also surprised at how little diversity there is among the 50-some comments on that article. Everyone is accepting the debate as framed and pitching their tent in one of the textbook camps. I find this way more alarming than the phenomenon of poor math test scores after 12 years of forced education. That no one is questioning the whole enterprise—that’s pretty disturbing.

I remember you from the Protocols group at Microsoft a coupla years ago and the LIFE is Good Unschooling Conference, too. Seems like y’all are happily settled into your life. Glad to hear it.

I really enjoyed the Mathematician’s Lament and I often say that it took me a decade after college to recover enough from “math education” to enjoy math for its own beauty. School turns it into such drudgery. Well, school did that to me for poetry, literature, history, etc. too; so math isn’t unique in that respect, it’s just that as a nation we *worry* about it so much. We don’t really worry about people’s ability to “do” poetry. Nobody working at McDonald’s needs to calculate how many iambs you get back if you give them a dactyllic hexameter for a regular cheesburger which is worth a spondaic pentameter.

What’s the old chestnut about the definition of insanity being a repetition of something over and over while expecting different results? The UW guy complains about the ineffective “new” methods of math instruction and wants to return to the “classic” methods but the new methods were introduced because the classic methods were such an abysmal failure. Obviously, we should try them again; maybe this time we’ll get a different result.

Or not.