Many of you might have read today’s (Sep 19) New York Times Magazine: the education issue. The focus is technology, and the article “Learning by Playing: Can video games transform schooling” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19video-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine is intriguing. I don’t have direct experience in this area, and would appreciate comments on this approach. I do want to share a paper by David Geary http://web.missouri.edu/~gearyd/AmericanPsych95.pdf with you, in which he theorized two classes of ability: biologically primary and biologically secondary. I have seen many creative approaches for teaching the former (e.g., small counting numbers and simple fractions), but have not seen much for the later involving more elaborate procedure (e.g., multicolumn addition/subtraction, general fraction operations like 5/87 + 7/93). Geary argued that the later ability can only be achieved through extensive practice. There is another article “Drill, baby, drill” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-medium-heffernan-t.html?ref=magazine in the same issue of the Times magazine. My own philosophy is that we can find interesting and exciting ways to introduce some math topics, but practice is absolutely essentially for students to master the subject, and practice is inevitably boring to some extent. We should acknowledge this, and shouldn’t give students the delusion that there is a short cut to learning, without some discomfort. I welcome your thoughts on this.

I also want to bring your attention to the book review section. Steven Strogatz wrote about Charles Seife’s “Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Strogatz-t.html?ref=books. Numbers can be so powerfully and persuasively misleading, and are being twisted to erode our democracy. As mentioned in another review, whether in advertising claims, crowd estimates, voter polls, economic analyses and warning about the extent of global warming, if you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it. This is a good point to bring to our classroom, as many math teachers found that they need to defend the teaching of the discipline in the computer age. Unquestioning awe of numbers is the oxygen of intellectual impostures.

Many of you might have read today’s (Sep 19) New York Times Magazine: the education issue. The focus is technology, and the article “Learning by Playing: Can video games transform schooling” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19video-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine is intriguing. I don’t have direct experience in this area, and would appreciate comments on this approach. I do want to share a paper by David Geary http://web.missouri.edu/~gearyd/AmericanPsych95.pdf with you, in which he theorized two classes of ability: biologically primary and biologically secondary. I have seen many creative approaches for teaching the former (e.g., small counting numbers and simple fractions), but have not seen much for the later involving more elaborate procedure (e.g., multicolumn addition/subtraction, general fraction operations like 5/87 + 7/93). Geary argued that the later ability can only be achieved through extensive practice. There is another article “Drill, baby, drill” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-medium-heffernan-t.html?ref=magazine in the same issue of the Times magazine. My own philosophy is that we can find interesting and exciting ways to introduce some math topics, but practice is absolutely essentially for students to master the subject, and practice is inevitably boring to some extent. We should acknowledge this, and shouldn’t give students the delusion that there is a short cut to learning, without some discomfort. I welcome your thoughts on this.

I also want to bring your attention to the book review section. Steven Strogatz wrote about Charles Seife’s “Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Strogatz-t.html?ref=books. Numbers can be so powerfully and persuasively misleading, and are being twisted to erode our democracy. As mentioned in another review, whether in advertising claims, crowd estimates, voter polls, economic analyses and warning about the extent of global warming, if you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it. This is a good point to bring to our classroom, as many math teachers found that they need to defend the teaching of the discipline in the computer age. Unquestioning awe of numbers is the oxygen of intellectual impostures.

[Mari Watanabe-Rose (she/her)]

Frank, thank you for sharing these articles! As for the Times Mag article on video games and learning, I, too, have little experience and would love to hear others’ comments on this. “Proofiness” is now on my future readings list. We all should learn the potential benefits, limitations, and harms of numbers; this is yet another book to (hopefully) make us a little more educated citizens… Some of the examples in the book may become good topics for math and stats classes, too.