“Problem solve” Dept

A recent article announced that the National Science Foundation funded a grant for West Virginia University College of Education and Human Services The grant is to help educate math teachers on a new way of teaching math to teachers. For those of you new to all this, NSF spent billions of dollars in grant money in the early 90’s to fund (in my opinion and the opinion of many others) ineffective and damaging math programs including Investigations in Number, Data and Space; Everyday Math; Connected Math Program; Core Plus; and Interactive Math Program.

Of particular interest to me was this sentence: “The hope was for math teachers to find ways to teach students how to problem-solve.”

It used to be that students solved problems. But now in today’s era of math reform, they “problem-solve”. Popular use of this rather irritating verb form harkens back to NCTM’s 1989 standards which downplayed…