A parent whose child goes to a high school in the Wake County Public School System has been sued after criticizing the math curriculum used in the district.
Utah-based "Mathematics Vision Project" or "MVP," filed a lawsuit against Blain Dillard, whose son attends Green Hope High in Cary.
Dillard has been vocal about his opposition to the MVP curriculum, which is student-driven and focuses on group work, posting on his website, blog and social media.
The lawsuit obtained by ABC11 said, "In or around March 2019, Dillard commenced a crusade against MVP, claiming that MVP is ineffective and has harmed many students."
It alleges that some of Dillard's statements were false and defamatory and harmed the company financially.
https://abc11.com/education/wake-schools-parent-sued-after-criticizing-math-curriculum/5430840/
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @07:21AM (2 children)
Exactly. You won't get revolutionary breakthroughs or even just creative solutions to more ordinary problems through rote memorization alone; you need to hone your critical thinking abilities for that. No one is opposed to memorizing information, because if you never memorized anything for even a short duration of time, you wouldn't have anything to work with. The problem is when rote memorization comes at the expense of teaching the hows and whys, which it so often does.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @02:19PM (1 child)
You'd be surprised how many educators are opposed to memorization strategies. I regularly get people arguing when I point out how much of math is memorization and pattern matching.
Yes, there's other pieces there, but unless you're doing something truly novel or that has excessively weird terms in it, chances are that pattern matching back to something similar you've seen will feature prominently in the process. The large the number of patterns you've got memorized, the quicker and more efficiently the process goes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10 2019, @08:20PM
You're right; I would be surprised. Almost our entire schooling system in the US is based around rote memorization and teaching to the test, from the homework assignments to the useless standardized tests, and to the almost complete exclusion of encouraging actual critical thinking skills. So, if there is a movement of teachers who oppose all forms of memorization (and not just to the exclusion of understanding and critical thinking skills), their presence must be insignificant.
That's true. because right now we only teach people to memorize facts about math, and not to understand how and why the underlying rules work. Proofs? Just memorize them; you don't need to understand them on a deep level. This is exactly the problem.
There are big pieces there. We should be teaching people to think like mathematicians, not monkeys. We should want people to do truly novel things, or at least be capable of it.