When I was a kid, people loved jokes about New Math. Lots of people bought Tom Lehrer’s latest album with a song named New Math.
“You’ve got thirteen and you take away seven,” he sang, “and that leaves five . . . well, six actually, but the idea is the important thing.”
Even Charles Schultz cracked on New Math in his Peanuts comic strips.
“How can you do New Math problems with an old math mind?” Charlie Brown wails.
Sally agrees. “Sets . . . One-to-one matching . . . Sets of one . . . Renaming two . . . Subsets . . . Joining sets . . . All I want to know, is how much is two and two?”
I laughed at the jokes, but I liked New Math. It showed me how numbers fit together in ways that are precise and beautiful
New Math was invented because of Sputnik. Our American brains had gotten lazy, teachers told us, because we’d been given too many answers. But no more. Now we had to figure problems out on our own like the Russian kids. The Russians didn’t mollycoddle their kids. That’s why they were smart enough to launch the first artificial satellite into space. America needed to step it up. And this was why the president started NASA and the Space Race and New Math.
Like Lehrer and Schultz, some of the teachers didn’t like this new-fangled math, especially Mrs. Brandt. Sometimes she’d go on a rant. Just tell a kid that eight times seven is fifty-six, she’d say. No need to reinvent the wheel. And what do bases and sets have to do with the real world? If someone needs to figure out how much carpeting is needed for a room, they sure don’t need to know how to count in Base 5. Real arithmetic—that’s what kids need.
But sometimes I wondered. Maybe Mrs. Brandt said these words because she didn’t really understand New Math. She’d explain a lesson, but when we had questions or got stuck doing problems at the board, she’d act confused and start telling us it was our job to figure it out, not hers.
I’d look at Mrs. Brandt, with her white hair and her forehead knotted up with thinking, and I’d remember Charlie Brown wailing about doing New Math with an old brain.
This made me sorry for Mrs. Brandt, but not sorry enough to stop liking New Math.
Apple to Apple 