Category: An Inconvenient Truth

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This post is a continuation of the other posts about the video on YouTube entitled “An Inconvenient Truth” with M.J McDermott (not to be confused with Al Gore’s film) which concerns the dismal state of American basic math education in public schools. You can view it here.

M.J. had two good premises, but her conclusion does not jibe. “Their methods suck.” (True.) “My method is better.” (True.) “Therefore mine is the one everyone should use.” (Nahhhhh.)

Why don’t you experiment a lot and discover what works best for you, and keep refining it? It can be so much more fun and rewarding to do that. Respect your mind, not the opinions and emotional responses that were put there by others in the past. Try this stuff out, then decide.

It’s important to mention that people who think it’s OK not to learn the basic arithmetical operations because “you can do it with a calculator” are just plain damn dumb. That’s like saying, “Hey, this ‘walking’ stuff sucks. It takes effort! Why do we need to learn to walk? That takes years! Let’s just give everyone a wheelchair!’

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I’m tipping my mitt a little early, because the intermediate multiplication lessons are not finished yet. But I thought people should have easy access to the basic method for advanced multiplication. This is the tip of the iceberg, but everyone should at least be able to do this method. Anything less than that is either merely standard or substandard.

Here’s the “mystery algorithm” for 26 * 31, or any other set of two-digit numbers. Keep in mind that the description is much longer than the problem should take. After a little practice, it should take no longer than 10 seconds to do a problem like this in your head.

Step 1:
Multiply the digits in the ones columns of both numbers together. That would be the 1 ( of 31) and the 6 (of 26). That gives you 6. That’s the final digit of the product.

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(If you use a little imagination you can guess the title of this article.)

This article concerns M.J. McDermott’s youTube video about the sad state of basic math education in America. You can visit the video here, or you can simply scroll down to the next entry here in the Math Mojo Chronicles, where it is embedded.

It seems like M.J. McDermott has unleashed a firestorm that need to be unleashed. She’s gotten almost 60,000 hits in one week on youTube for a video about math! Imagine that! Good work, M.J.!

I’ve commented on that video several times, mentioning that there is at least one much better algorithm than what is called the “standard.”

Not one of the hundreds of other people who commented on the video seems to be aware of this, which is strange, because most of the comments to M.J.s video were posted by obviously thoughtful people. And one man who is obviously a lot better at mathematics than I am even made a video-reply to M.J.s video - but still stuck in standard mode.

Here is a synopsis of my part of the discussion so far:

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First a tip of the hat to thethinkingmother blog, an interesting homeschool blog, where I found out about the video that is the subject of this post.

The title of this post is a little strong, but I want to make an important point.

No, I’m not going to rag on Al Gore.

This post is about an interesting and provocative post on youTube, by M.J. McDermott. Ms. McDermott is a meteorologist on a Seattle news station, and she is concerned about the miserable state of math education in this country.

She has done a very nice exposé of some mindless math books and programs that have wormed their way into many school systems.
When you watch the video (I’ve linked to it here) you may be tempted to agree with just about everything, and become “incensed” at the state of affairs.

Me, too.

But it is all too easy to shake our little fists in the air and want to “get back to the good old ways” of doing things. The good old way in this case is what Ms. McDermott calls “The Standard Algorithm.” And there lies the rub.

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