【单选题】
Since the Reading Wars of the 1990s, the U.S. has largely gone reD、Remember the Reading Wars In the 1980s, educators embraced "whole language" as the key to teaching kids to love reading. Instead of using "SeeDick and Jane Run" primers, grade-school teachers taught reading with authentic kid lit: storybooks by respected authors, likeEricCarle (PolarBear, PolarBear). They encouraged 5-and 6-year-olds to write with "inventive spelling". It was fun. Teachers felt creative. The founders of whole language never intended it to displace the teaching of phonics or proper spelling, but that’s what happened in many places. The result was a generation of kids who couldn’t spell, including a high percentage who had to be turned over to specialEd instructors to learn how to reaD、That eventually ushered in the current joyless back-to-phonics movement, with its endless hours of reading-skill drills. Welcome back,Dick and Jane.
Now we’re into the Math Wars. WithAmerican kids foundering on state math exams and getting clobbered on international tests by their peers in Singapore andBelgium, parents and policymakers have been searching for a culprit. They’ve found it in the math equivalent of whole language—so-called fuzzy math, an object of parental contempt from coast to coast. Fuzzy math, properly called reform math, is the bastard child of teaching standards introduced by the NationalCouncil of Teachers of Mathematics (N.C、T.M) in 1989. Like whole language, it was a sensible approach that got distorted into a parody of itself. The reform standards, for instance, called for teaching the uses of a calculator and estimation, but some educators took that as a license to stop drilling the multiplication tables, skip past long division and give lots of partial credit for wrong answers. "Some of the textbooks and materials were absolutely hideous," says R. James Milgram, a professor of mathematics at StanforD、
Adding to the math morass was the fact that 49 states (all but Iowa) devised their own math standards, with up to 100 different goals for each grade level. Textbook publishers responded with textbooks that tried to incorporate every goal of every state. "There are some 700-page third-grade math books out there," says N.C、T.M.’s current president Francis Fennell, professor of education at Maryland’s McDanielCollege.
Now the N.C、T.M. itself has come riding to the rescue. In a notably slim document, it has identified just three essential goals, or "focal points", for each grade from pre-K to eighth, none of them fuzzy, all of them building blocks for higher math. In fourth grade, for instance, the group recommends focusing on the quick recall of multiplication facts, a deep understanding of decimals and the ability to measure and compute the area of rectangles, circles and other shapes. "Our objective," says Fennell, "is to get conversations going at the state level about what really is important." In recent weeks, that’s begun to happen. Florida and Utah and half a dozen other states are talking about revising their math standards to match the pared-down approach. Tha
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