They're at it again

[unixronin]

The school just sent a letter home with a booklet of vocabulary words ... from the math program.  It contains things like "number sentence".

You'd immediately recognize what they call a "number sentence".  It looks like, for example, "2 + 3 = 5".

There's a perfectly good word for that already.  We call it an equation.  What asshat thought it was a good idea to go muddying the water by making up inaccurate terms like "number sentence"?  (The previous iteration was "number fact".)

Precision and accuracy are important in mathematics.  There are reasons why we use terms whose meanings are precisely defined.  Equations — or mathematical statements in general — have different structure and obey different rules than sentences, and different sets of operations can be performed upon them.  Calling them sentences confuses the issue to no purpose.

Instead of kludging together some artificial term that vaguely approximates what something is, why not just teach the correct word and its meaning in the first place?  We don't teach children to talk about "milkable dogs" when we mean a cow, so why are we making up crap like "number sentence"?  Talking about a number sentence is like talking about a feathered cat.  If it has feathers, it isn't a cat, it's a bird; and if it's made up of constants, variables, and mathematical operators, it's not a sentence, it's an equation.  (Or an inequality, or an identity, or one of several other kinds of mathematical statement.)

And we wonder why our schools are failing.

Comments

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Good intentions gone awry. There are astonishingly few elementary level teachers that enjoy math (or have taken anything beyond algebra, assuming they didn't take logic instead for the math requirement.) That means that the teachers that do know math are able to dictate most curriculum choices about math. I think we are seeing the developers of the curriculum trying to introduce some very sophisticated concepts early in the education process. I am not really opposed to that, if the actual instructor understands what they are trying to teach.

I think another aspect of this is to limit the new vocabulary [jargon] that is used in a new field. If we teach a vocabulary that borrows from what the instructors are familiar with, and understand, we reduce the anxiety in both the instructor and students. Precision of expression can be learned later, if needed. My children learned very early to be precise in their requests and statements. That has spilled over into their education experiences outside of the home.