AMERICA'S MATH TEACHERS COMPARE POORLY WITH OTHERS SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE Date: Friday, November 12, 1999 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH Scripps Howard News Service Memo: COLUMN For SUNDAY release (Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.) Edition: I know we're a bit past Halloween, but if you'd like to scare yourself with educational nightmares, check out "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics," by Ma Liping. Here's a glimpse into the thought processes of a person struggling with the calculation 1 3/4 divided by 1/2. "It seems that you need to, you cannot work with a fraction and a mixed number, so the first thing I would do, I turn this into some number of fourths. "So you would have 7/4 divided by 1/2. Is this, is being the same as multiplying by 2 as my understanding. So that the steps that I would take, now I am starting to wonder if I am doing this right. Would be that I have 7/4 that I have converted this divided by 1/2 is the same as doing 7/4 times 2, I think. "So that gives you 14, let me see if this ... wait a second Now let me think through this process .... I cannot tell if it makes sense because I cannot remember .... and for some reason I thought that that was exactly the formula that I remembered. But I'm not sure if it is logical." If your children were learning mathematics from someone this confused, you'd think it was a nightmare. But you would be wide awake, because this person is an experienced American teacher. In fact she was enrolled in a program called Educational Leaders in Mathematics for teachers chosen for advanced training so they can guide other teachers in their districts. She and other teachers in the program, 11 in all with an average of more than 10 years' teaching experience, also participated in a study of their mathematical expertise conducted by researchers at Michigan State University. An additional 12 U.S. teachers in the study were working on their master's degree. Only nine of the 23 got the right answer to 1 3/4 divided by 1/2. And on the second part of the task, to make up a real-world situation or a story problem to illustrate the calculation, only one American teacher succeeded - if you think that a question whose answer is "3 1/2 people" counts as success. The author of this book, Liping Ma, worked on the research study as a graduate assistant at MSU. She was born in Shanghai, and as a middle-school student during the Cultural Revolution, she was sent into the countryside, where she was soon drafted into service as a teacher in a rural elementary school. At MSU, Ma was struck by the contrast between the American teachers she was studying and the teachers she remembered from her own elementary education. So for her dissertation at Stanford, she extended the research to a group of 72 Chinese teachers with varying amounts of experience, recruited from a range of urban and rural schools. They were more representative of the typical Chinese elementary teacher than the above-average American group. Moreover, Chinese teachers usually have less formal education than Americans two or three years of normal school training after ninth grade. All of the Chinese teachers got the correct answer to the division calculation. And 65 of the 72 proposed a reasonable story problem, many of them more than one. There is an international learning gap, and it's not only America's children who fall into it. In fact, the comparison is even less flattering than I've said so far. Ma also tested a group of Chinese ninth-graders. They did better than the American teachers too. I'm not surprised. The year I taught at East China Normal University in Shanghai, one of my classes was preparation for the Graduate Record Exam. I had my students take a sample exam from the GRE book, and the median math score in my class was 640. They weren't math or science students, either. There were four topics in Ma's study. Besides the division question, teachers were asked how they would teach subtraction with regrouping; how they would respond to a student's error in multi-digit multiplication; and how they would explore a student's novel idea about geometry. By now you can guess the results. The American teachers' understanding of these fundamental topics was badly muddled, so that even the things they could do themselves they couldn't explain. Several confessed they had to look up the formulas for perimeter and area of a rectangle. If you're a teacher or an administrator, read this book. If you're a parent, at least read the excellent and extensive review of it by Roger Howe, professor of mathematics at Yale, in the September issue of the "Notices of the American Mathematical Society," which is available at www.ams.org. And when people try to tell you there's no crisis in American education, you can tell them they're dreaming.