In the News
In a story for National Geographic, MƒA President Maria Klawe and MƒA Master Teachers Dawoun Jyung and Danilsa Fernandez offer their expertise on how today's teaching methods prioritize creative problem-solving over traditional formulas and equations. The article explores how math might be a constant in school, but how it’s taught has changed dramatically in recent years. One primary motivation for those changes is to prepare students for a more unpredictable and complex future.
Common Core represents the first time a comprehensive set of math standards is being taught across the United States, says Maria Klawe, president of Math for America, a nonprofit dedicated to helping math and science teachers.
Klawe says these standards don’t just focus on formulas and equations. Common Core math emphasizes “problem-solving, collaboration, and embedding concepts in real-life examples,” she says.
Mostly gone are the days when teachers would lecture at the front of the classroom while students quietly took notes. Now, teachers present a few concepts, and then students work together to solve problems in different ways, Klawe says.
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The goal? Helping kids develop skills they’ll need to navigate a world filled with challenges—like climate change, pandemics, and geopolitical conflicts, says Dawoun Jyung, a middle school math teacher at Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School in New York City.
“Our world is becoming more and more complex,” she says, adding that students need different mathematical tools to succeed.
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Danilsa Fernandez, a high school math teacher in New York City, has two children a decade apart in age, and she’s seen firsthand how much math instruction has changed. “The way that certain math problems are posed has changed quite a bit, and if I compare it to the way I learned math, it’s still different,” she says.
For instance, while helping her son with fifth-grade math homework, Fernandez was surprised to see him working on a division-related word problem. This approach was a significant shift from her own experience, where division was taught algorithmically—through a series of repetitive steps to reach a final answer. “The fact that he had a word problem and then worked out the division problem in a different method was mind-boggling to me,” she says.