I am not sure that I understand what is meant by "fluency" in this article. The conservative idea of the goal of mathematics learning is fluency while the progressive idea is understanding. Surely you can't have understanding without fluency, nor fluency without understanding. I believe that fluency for the conservative idea may be the ability to churn out answers but surely if you are "fluent" at this then you have understanding and your knowledge isn't just instrumental. I do not believe that any mathematical proof can be considered a good proof if it is not fluent. Possibly I am not grasping what is meant.
Having gone to school in the UK it was interesting for me to read about Margaret Thatcher. At the age of six I was already very aware of this woman's changes to the school system. We knew her as "Margaret Thatcher the milk snatcher", due to her putting a stop to the government providing us with our free milk at break time.
The final point I would like to make on this article is with regards to the TIMMS study. I have always known that there is a lot of politics involved in the world of teaching but I've never really given much thought as to why. Upon reading this paragraph a lightbulb went off in my head and I suddenly thought "world domination"! That's what it's all about, having the most money, the biggest secrets and producing the most knowledgeable children so that if needs be you can prove you're the most powerful. Or maybe I've been watching too many movies?
"World domination"? Yes, I think that's what many powerful countries ARE aiming for -- it's not just something made up for the movies! Here in Canada, we don't have any pretensions to being a superpower, but we certainly observe others that do. And everyone likes to be rated high in international polls of all kinds.
ReplyDeleteBy fluency, I mean speed and ease at doing tasks by routinizing them. Students can become fluent arithmetic calculators or algebraic equation-solvers, for example. In the best situations, this fluency is closely tied in with the development of in-depth, relational understanding -- but in many cases, people develop an instrumental, procedural fluency without understanding, and this is a very fragile and incomplete way to know something.