Reflections on Battleground Schools

The first point that made me stop was the Progressive reform associated with Dewey. Before entering this BEd program, I often thought about what kind of teaching method could help students accept mathematical ideas more easily. Dewey’s idea of letting students do mathematics through experimentation, inquiry, and testing hypotheses is very good. However, education is a complex problem. Teachers have different teaching styles, and students have very different levels of interest and attention. In my past two years of teaching, I have found that many students cannot focus for a very long time. Therefore, the actual time that a teacher has to explain important ideas is often limited. My own solution has been to make each part short and repeat important ideas many times. In this way, whenever students focus again, they still have a chance to catch up. I think a good educational idea may be complex, but the way it is carried out needs to be clear, simple, and repeatable. Otherwise, even a very good idea may be difficult to implement successfully.

The second point that made me stop was the failure of New Math. There is a Chinese saying that “if the foundation is not strong, the whole structure will shake.” I think this describes the situation very well. The idea of preparing future scientists by introducing university mathematics into high school education is not necessarily wrong. However, before students learn more abstract ideas, we need to ask whether they have a strong enough foundation in high school mathematics. Does the high school curriculum provide enough mathematical tools for them to understand university-level content? Simply moving faster has no value. If adding university courses to high school could automatically improve a country’s scientific and technological level, then we could simply start teaching complex analysis in kindergarten. Students need time to build their mathematical understanding step by step.

The third point that made me stop was the article’s discussion of math-phobic attitudes. I agree that negative experiences and social assumptions can affect students’ attitudes toward mathematics. However, I also think mathematics is a special subject because of its strong logical structure. Mathematical ideas are connected like links in a chain. If a student misses one important link, they may not be able to continue the reasoning, even if they understand many other parts. I do not think this is only a problem with assessment. It is related to the structure of mathematics itself. Teachers should be honest about this, but we should not tell students that they are not suitable for mathematics. Instead, we need to find the missing link as early as possible and help them rebuild it through clear explanations, short steps, and repeated practice.