I’m reading the New York Times article “A Better Way to Teach Math,” and I can’t help thinking athousandtimesyes. Not only is this math tutor’s method giving the lie to the idea that there are “math people” and “not-math people” (which I myself once believed), but he’s also able to introduce game dynamics and intellectual micro-steps in a way that’s perfectly effective and not tedious.
As the children experienced repeated success, it seemed to Mighton that their brains actually began to work more efficiently. Sometimes adding one more drop of knowledge led to a leap in understanding. One day, a child would be struggling; the next day she would solve a problem that was harder than anything she’d previously handled. Mighton saw that if you provided painstaking guidance, children would make their own discoveries. That’s why he calls his approach “guided discovery.”
This is very consistent with Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament, which changed the way I think - both about mathematics and and about mathematics education. As Mighton points out, there’s no reason to veer between hand-off education that relies on self-discovery and a stifling “banking” model.
I’m keen to read The Myth of Ability, the book that the curriculum’s developer wrote.
