http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html?_r=1&referer= When Akihiko Takahashi was a junior in college in 1978, he was like most of the other students at his university in suburban Tokyo. He had a vague sense of wanting to accomplish something but no clue what that something should be. But that spring he met a man who would become his mentor, and this relationship set the course of his entire career. Takeshi Matsuyama was an elementary-school teacher, but like a small number of instructors in Japan, he taught not just young children but also college students who wanted to become teachers. At the university-affiliated elementary school where Matsuyama taught, he turned his classroom into a kind of laboratory, concocting and trying out new teaching ideas. When Takahashi met him, Matsuyama was in the middle of his boldest experiment yet — revolutionizing the way students learned math by radically changing the way teachers taught it. Instead of having students memorize and then practice endless lists of equations — which Takahashi remembered from his own days in school — Matsuyama taught his college students to encourage passionate discussions among children so they would come to uncover math’s procedures, properties and proofs for themselves. One day, for example, the young students would derive the formula for finding the area of a rectangle; the next, they would use what they learned to do the same for parallelograms. Taught this new way, math itself seemed transformed. It was not dull misery but challenging, stimulating and even fun. Takahashi quickly became a convert. He discovered that these ideas came from reformers in the United States, and he dedicated himself to learning to teach like an American. Over the next 12 years, as the Japanese educational system embraced this more vibrant approach to math, Takahashi taught first through sixth grade. Teaching, and thinking about teaching, was practically all he did. A quiet man with calm, smiling eyes, his passion for a new kind of math instruction could take his colleagues by surprise. “He looks very gentle and kind,” Kazuyuki Shirai, a fellow math teacher, told me through a translator. “But when he starts talking about math, everything changes.”
Pretty interesting. I wonder out loud, do our Universities buy in? It has to start with the teachers buying in for sure and we don't have that as of yet. IMO.
The teachers are not educated on the newer methods, so they either drop back to the older methods or teach it incorrectly. Combined with the opposition of anything viewed as being "new" by the political establishment we come up with innovations for others to implement and succeed while we lament about being great once upon a time.
Maybe the Government should plan to educate first and implement next. It's easy to oppose something that isn't working and the child is only 8 one time. If the educators don't master the craft before implementation there isn't much chance of success.
That is the problem there is no education first because that costs money to implement. We do not pay teachers enough now and some have even stated they should work for less to show they really want to educate.
