"base ten is just like base eight really-- if you're missing two fingers!"

[quotidians]

It's unreasonably late but I feel like writing something about the late great Tom Lehrer, my favourite satirical ditties of his and how much I miss knowing he was alive and well and eating prunes (or whatever ninety-seven year olds do) at his residence somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anyway, "That Was the Year That Was" has some of my favourite recordings of his, I think because it offers such a deranged glimpse into the past and the ideas of the day. MLF, nuclear proliferation, National Brotherhood Week, Hubert Humphrey's political career, Operation Paperclip, Vatican II... it's unironically given me some perspective on what the sixties were like. And the tunes themselves are unreasonably catchy, which is always a plus.

Watch on YouTube

One idea from the past I find particularly insane/hilarious is the "New Math." I distinctly remember seeing this video ages ago, before I knew what Lehrer was even satirizing. The Wikipedia page doesn't make it more believable when it reads like it's a satirical work in its own right, like it was ripped straight off Uncyclopedia. Apparently some French mathematicians and statesmen thought it imperative to reform elementary math education by... de-emphasizing geometry and calculus in favour of abstract and linear algebra. I mean talk about trying to run before you can walk. I'd like to say that some aspects of New Math make it the stupidest idea to ever come out of France but then I remember they gave nukes to the Israelis and I realize it truly can get stupider. I digress: experts (Richard Feynman among them) haaaaaated the New Math, and it was pretty much discarded after the seventies, but there was a generation of students that learned math like this in school. I know Dreamwidth's got a lot of older users, so I'd love to hear from anyone who actually remembers this. Did the new math seriously go that far? Did they actually make high schoolers learn linear algebra instead of Euclidean geometry? I gotta know...

Comments

[michaelboy]

When I was young (before new math), we weren't mandated to use any predescribed shortcuts to solving. Instead, since each person's "math brain" works a little differently, we were given the freedom to utilize any methods that felt appropriate to us. The classic example for me and many others is often something like 3 x 99 = 3 x 100 - 3, however it was never imposed on us. We were free to choose. I learned geometry in high school but never linear algebra until college.

[quotidians]

Hey I do that trick too! That's interesting. In my experience, some topics introduced back then have stuck around instead of being completely discarded. We did some basic set theory, but no symbolic logic or bases other than 10, and definitely no linear algebra. I guess now I can kind of see why they thought it important to introduce these concepts early, so I assume one of the main issues was lack of consideration for teachers being under-equipped to keep up with the curriculum.