clew's reviews: a book log

Radical Equations, Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb,, Jr.

The introduction argues that mathematical illiteracy is the current equivalent of the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s. The next several chapters are a narrative of the Civil Rights struggle, by one who was there and remembers people who were murdered for it, just to make clear how serious an analogy he's making. The end and heart of the book are a thick, much-quoting description of the development and principles of the Algebra Project. This last not only teaches more kids more math faster than most schools, certainly poor schools with minority students, manage; but it does so by getting them to love math, to play with it, to demand more algebra classes -- sometimes to demand that the uninterested teachers just get out of their way. The students have to care, and then the teachers, and then the administrators (some of whom clearly saw this as yet another insurrection).

It sounds enviable, and raises test scores, and may be teachable (more by Each one teach one than by professional seminars). It sounds exhausting and exhilarating. It also doesn't seem to be growing very quickly, if I understand their website correctly; I hope that's only places they are currently teaching new people, not all schools using the system. The NSF and a fair cut of professional mathematicians support them.

And it rises out of formal philosophy as well as lived philosophy -- Moses wrote his doctoral thesis on "the history and insights of W. V. O. Quine's philosophy and math, and one of Quine's insights turned out to be of direct relevance and importance to the teaching of school mathematics." That would be the 'regimentation of ordinary discourse', or, getting from the idea of quantity to the idea of vector (on the T; truly, the importance of public transportation is hard to exaggerate) to algebra.

Find in a Library: Radical Equations