– ​​As another school year begins in Canada, fuzzy-math supporters are back across the country​. While some of them don’t hesitate to call it ​the “new way” of teaching math​, the concept of “fuzzy math,” as well as ​the so-called​ “discovery learning,” dates back 100 years to the early progressive education movement. A leftover idea from the romantic era, according to which classical education dehumanizes children and should be instead organic and autonomous, as for wild animals.

– Fuzzy math proponents believe that practice to master skills and rote learning are less important than “deep insight.” They encourage teachers not to teach directly, but rather to help students to discover things, solve problems, and construct their own language in teaching themselves and their peers. Some say that teachers in the past turned students off math by stressing only speed and computation, comparing this with learning to read by only practicing the alphabet. This is to forget that knowing the alphabet is the fundamental step in learning to read.

Mental Arithmetic in the Rachinsky School by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky (Wikipedia)

By the way, where are the girls?

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