Kitchen Table Math

Rocky Mountain News reported You meet the nicest people on blogs. A few weeks ago I wrote a column soliciting advice for Denver's new school superintendent, Michael Bennet, on how to chose his chief academic officer. One of the readers who responded was Catherine Johnson, from New York. She invited me to go have a look at the Web log she started in April with Carolyn Johnston, Kitchen Table Math. In her message, Catherine said she and Carolyn - you do understand why I'm not going to call them "Johnson and Johnston," right? - call their project a "bliki," a combination of "blog," a term that is probably familiar by now, and "wiki," which may not be; it refers to a free public collaborative archive. More about that later, because I've been meaning to write about wikis for some time now. Since that message, the authors have moved on to "blooki," but books are a known technology.

Whatever you call it (blog, wiki, bliki, or blooki, it is worth a look)

"On the home page Carolyn and I blog about math ed and the math wars, and about teaching math to our kids," Catherine wrote. "We created Kitchen Table Math because we've had to teach math at home after our children floundered in school." Catherine says she was drafted into teaching math at home when her son failed the last two units of his fourth-grade math class. Her blog partner Carolyn "became Ben's back-up teacher when her Boulder school district brought in Everyday Math. Ben is a very high-functioning autistic 11-year-old, and math had been his best subject, the one class where he could integrate with his peers and function as well as or better than the typical kids. "Once Everyday Math was implemented,' Ben needed an aide. "Heartbreaking." Yes, it is, which is why I recruited people who would tell Bennet how to get out of the trap Denver set for itself when it adopted Everyday Math and other fashionable but ineffective curriculums.

I am not famiiliar with the current "Everyday Math" curriculum, but I know that education in the US has deteriorated significantly after one bad approach after another has been introduced. I wish they would go back to the old Reading, and Writing, and Arithmetic approach that was used when we went to school.

You understand that there is a difference of opinion on this. I received one message from a distinguished mathematician (someone my late husband and I knew slightly many years ago) who asked, "But is it intellectually respectable to quote entirely from one fringe of Math Wars opinions without even the hint that there is another side to this story?" Why yes indeed, it is "intellectually respectable" for a columnist to present only one side of an argument, just as it is intellectually respectable for an attorney to present only one side of a case. We're advocates.

You go, girl!

It might, for the sake of argument, be preferable to examine the opponents' weaknesses, but that's a tactic, not a professional obligation.

That is true. It would be interesting to see a central place where advocates on two different sides could debate the issue, much like the Becker-Posner Blog, but it is equally interesting to see advocates of one particular position free to tout the advantages of their position.

Anyway, both children are now doing well in math, and if you have children who are being subjected to this pernicious nonsense in their schools, Kitchen Table Math is a good place to start, with lots of links to other resources.

About those wikis. At wikipedia.org (click on English), the introduction says, "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit. "In this English version, started in 2001, we are currently working on 647,347 articles." An encyclopedia anyone can edit? How reliable can that be? Quite, it turns out. As journalist Dan Gillmor likes to say, "Your audience knows more than you do," and with more than 300,000 people contributing to Wikipedia, they collectively know a lot. The person who wrote the first wiki software, Ward Cunningham, says (see c2.com/doc/etymology.html online) that he chose the name from the Hawaiian word wiki-wiki for "very very quick." I first heard the term a couple of years ago, at a technology conference, and was more than a little skeptical. Wouldn't trolls and vandals ruin a wiki?

On political matters dueling trolls can certainly disrupt a Wiki, and in fact Wikipedia often has to lock certain entries to prevent that, but on many topics their entries can be very useful.

But lately I've been seeing Wikipedia.org come up more and more often as one of the top results of a Google search. The information isn't perfectly reliable, but then neither is information in a traditional encyclopedia, and Wikipedia is certainly more up-to-date. It already has extensive coverage of the London suicide bombings, for instance (with tons of links). And after all, the whole point of a wiki is that if I see something there that I believe is wrong, I can change it. If I'm the one who's wrong, better informed people will change it back. Every step of that debate can be traced by anybody interested, and most contested issues that have an answer eventually converge on it.Since 2003, Wikipedia has been managed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its policy is that all articles should be written from a neutral point of view: without bias, representing all views fairly.

For a test, I decided to look up Nicolas Bourbaki, whose mathematical works we studied in grad school. He seemed especially suitable because he's not a single authority but a collective pseudonym for a group of highly influential French mathematicians. A standard encyclopedia had a couple of hundred words - though it did deliciously describe him as "a nonexistent but very clever polycephalic French mathematician. Wikipedia's article was nearly 2,000 words, thorough and well-informed, with rich links to original sources. Whoever wrote it, t(he)y knew what they were talking about.