An Interview with Prof. George R. Thomas

QUESTION: You stated in your essay "Why MathPath?" that remedies for the malais in education must be sought. In your opinion, what are these remedies?
ANSWER: Observing, as I did, that remedies must be sought is easy. Prescribing the remedies is not. Now, even before considering remedies, we need to know what the problem is - note that we are pointing the finger at ourselves rather than at other countries. Let us simplify the problem as this: The student in junior high or high school in general is not getting the concepts. Let us also simplify and say that the fault does not lie with students, parents, the surrounding society, or school funding, or even with the shortcomings of a particular teacher. In short, let us say the problem is with content and pedagogy.
What is taught and how it is taught is then our question.
What is taught
Mathematics content should not be chosen like people choose clothes according to what today is in style. The school curriculum content should be influenced by what mathematical disciplines have prevailed in the foundational core and by how much the young human brain has advanced. The first of these two tells me that Geometry should not be removed from being a course in high school - as well as middle school - but presented in a way that beautifully exhibits the deductive method it contributed to mathematics as a whole. Noting that algebra skills and a confident familarity with functions and trigonometry are what are needed to take the freshman college math courses, any algebra course that does not exactly build on the previous algebra course but repeates a good portion of it should be removed; that is, a streamlined and exhaustive algebra curriculum is needed - I believe the NCTM Standards address this. If the Algebra I - Algebra II - Pre-calculus sequence addresses the NCTM Standards and the repetition occasionally present is of ideas, not formulas, algorithms and computations, then it would suffice. A solid foundation in functions and trigonometry should be preferred over taking a course in high school Calculus. Then the students will not be required to take algebra in college and they can delve deep into the college calculus course and the student would get to experience "the greatest technical advance in exact thinking" that the great John von Neumann said Calculus is.
Testing student understanding
Look for ways - perhaps, through nation-wide or at least state-wide exit tests ( not multiple-choice format) for each grade - to test student understanding rather than skill; this will reduce the mechanical drilling and the teaching of tricks to pass tests. A nationwide or statewide exit test can have greater quality due to the central funding and can even be designed to emphasize the learning outcomes of critical as well as analytical thinking as they relate to a national or statewide curriculum for the grade.

How Math is Taught
In considering how math is taught, we are led to considering the common practice today - the traditional lecture method. The efficacy of the method is an ongoing debate. My feeling is that in a given course, say in junior high or high school especially, lecture is sometimes appropriate while at other times a more interactive format is. Even during a lecture, there can be interactive intervals.
Student Islands in school classes
I believe that a class should be split up into groups of size between three and six - this size is an interesting topic for investigation. The groups should form islands of desks and chairs facing the front of the class, with room between islands for the teacher to walk about. There are several advantages to forming islands. Let me mention three: (a) Whereas only about 30% [3] of the students follow the lecture in a traditional class, the percentage would be much more with the islands. (b) The islands are suitable for having the class do problems. They can discuss problems right there. "The main audio-visual tool, the most dependable and responsive component in any coordinated instructional system, is the classmate of the student."[3] The islands can compete with each other - for the very intelligent, this might be more fun than TV football. (c) An island system enables large class sizes, say 50 as opposed to 20. This would result in immense cost savings in education. What we need is not small class but larger classroom. (d) Islands reduce the "strong dependence on the teacher as source of learning relative to other sources ... and the student's belief that they cannot learn math on their own" and "need some knowledgeable authority to provide assistance." [2]
***** A criticism of Islands could be that it would increase the noise level of the classroom. True, but hold your ear close to a bee hive. The best noise in the world is the noise of work. And this informs that portable classrooms are not suitable for math classes.
Learning Space Design
The foregoing, student islands, actually comes under the design of learning space. There is more to learning space. One problem today is the design of lecture halls as multipurpose multimedia spaces. Projection screens that block the board are not suitable for a math class. Math classes need lot of black board writing space and placement of projection screen so the teacher's work on the board is not blocked.
Homework
Homework given to students must be carefully selected and coordinated regarding time and quality. Both time and quality are important for homework or you harm the student. Too much time spent on homework will not only not improve grades but also adversely affect the student's social development. A rule of thumb is 10 minutes total for each grade. Thus a grade 3 student would be required to do about 30 minutes of homework a day, whereas a grade 12 student would do about two hours. And that is not all math but all subjects combined. This involves coordination among teachers. Quality of the work assigned is equally important. The photocopied math sheets are the easy way for the teacher. But the standard "math sheet" is boring. No wonder, most students don't like math! Doing the homework in any subject should ideally make for an excited, happy, and engaged time for the child. The drill sheets in math do not evoke this. So, go for assignments that involve not only practice, for some amount of practice is useful and even necessary, but also calls for a brain response different from practice.
Calculators in class
Calculators should be banished from the school math classrooms, for these implementers - is there such a word? - of algorithms might confuse the student that real mathematics also includes computation. The devil called "product sales" has gotten hold of the unsuspecting school teacher or the bribed calculator-pushing mathematician (speaking at NCTM and other large teacher meetings). The only justifiable need for a calculator in the mathematics class room is to check a time-consuming graph, but the advantage is small compared to the harm in the student's over-reliance for simpler chores. Let every math teacher acquire a confident familiarity with the graphs of the six trigonometric functions, the conics, the exponential function, the logarithm function, and the 1/xⁿ function, and let every student memorize the multiplication table, instead. A calculator is indeed an aid to computation in statistics classes; but statistics is not mathematics; it is applied mathematics.