An interesting blog post in the Education Week blogs yesterday raised this question. This takes up the discussion that has been going since the National Council on Teacher Quality released its report concerning the (lack of) mathematics preparation of teachers. The post also brings up the forthcoming TEDS-M study, which will probably add to this discussion.

So, how much should a teacher know? The following quote from the blog post touches this:

It seems obvious that teachers must have knowledge of the subject matter they will actually teach. But how much more knowledge should a teacher have than what she or he is seeking to assist students in learning? The case of secondary school mathematics is instructive. Is it enough for a high school trigonometry teacher to know trigonometry cold – but not, say, real analysis, or ordinary differential equations?

This issue was exactly the one that was raised in the LMT project (Learning Mathematics for Teaching) at University of Michigan. This was also the main issue in an article written by Heather Hill, Deborah Ball and Stephen Schilling in the last issue of Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. (The LMT team has also written several other scientific articles about the issue.)

A new issue of the ICMI newsletter is out. If you are not subscribing, you can read the entire newsletter in text format here.

One of the many interesting news in this newsletter is concerning a new website about the history of ICMI. The website is edited by Fulvia Furinghetti and Livia Giacardi, and this site provides you with en excellent set of resources for information about the history of ICMI and, in many ways, the history of our field of research.

Another interesting information is concerning the so-called “ICMI Reading Room” at SpringerLink.

Up to December 31, 2008, members of the international community of
mathematics educators will have open access, via SpringerLink.com, to
selected works published in Springer journals of the four most recent
ICMI medallists (Paul Cobb, Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, Jeremy Kilpatrick and
Anna Sfard).

These sholars represent some of the most important milestones in our field, and this is a very nice opportunity to learn more about the work of these four medallists.

The newsletter also announces the launcing of a new journal in mathematics education: Sutra – The International Journal of Mathematics Education. Sutra is the official journal of the Technomathematics Research Foundation, and the first issue will be published online in August this year.

You can read about this and much more in the lates issue of the ICMI newsletter. If you want to subscribe to the newsletter, there are two ways of doing that:

1. Click on http://www.mathunion.org/ICMI/Mailinglist with a Web browser and go to the “Subscribe” button to subscribe to ICMI News online.
2. Send an e-mail to icmi-news-request at mathunion.org with the Subject-line: Subject: subscribe

The excellent blog: Let’s Play Math! presents a post about history of mathematics on the internet. The blog post features an extensive list of links for further reading about the history of mathematics.

Yesterday, NCETM (the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics) hosted an online panel discussion concerning the teaching and learning of proof. The main issues of the debate was:

• How do you teach proof?
• What place do you think proof has in the mathematics curriculum?
• At what age should proof be introduced to learners and how?

The following three articles are available online to accompany the discussion:

• Article 1: Students’ Views of Proof, Celia Hoyles and Lulu Healy, Mathematics in School Issue 3 May 1999, published by The Mathematical Association;
• Article 2: Interpreting the Mathematics Curriculum: Developing reasoning through algebra and geometry, published by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2004;
• Article 3: Teaching Pythagoras’ Theorem, Paul Chambers, Mathematics in Schools Issue 4 1999, published by The Mathematical Association.

Cognitive Daily is an interesting blog that presents articles and posts within the field of cognitive psychology. Yesterday, Dave Munger wrote an interesting post called: How hints help speed up math performance — and what this says about memory. The post is about the following article:

Campbell, J.I., Fuchs-Lacelle, S., Phenix, T.L. (2006). Identical elements model of arithmetic memory: Extension to addition and subtraction. Memory & Cognition, 34(3), 633-647.

NCTM is a huge organization for teachers of mathematics in the US, and it has certainly had a strong impact through the years. Michael Paul Goldenberg – author of the blog: Rational Mathematics Education – has written a very long and interesting article where he criticize this grand organization. For me – a Norwegian researcher with both legs planted firmly in Europe – this provides an interesting insight into the US discourse. I recommend reading the article, whether you agree with his views or not!

Education Week has a couple of interesting articles relating to mathematics education this week:

• Why the Best Math Curriculum Won’t Be a Textbook is an article that takes up discussions about mathematics curriculum standards and textbooks. One of the recommendations from the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel was shorter, more focused and more coherent textbooks, and this is discussed in the article.
• Math Group Tries to Help Young Teachers Stay the Course takes up the problem of young teachers that quit from the teaching profession, and an effort made by NCTM to help in that respect.

Both these articles are unfortunately only available to subscribers of Education Week, but they address interesting issues related to mathematics education.

The third and last reading tips in this connection, is a post from the “Let’s play math!” blog. The post is entitled “How to teach math to a struggling student“, and it starts off this important discussion with a practical example. If you don’t agree with the advice given in the post, you might consider dropping a comment in the blog, because this is an important and interesting discussion!

The ATM journal Mathematics Teaching has a very nice (and growing) archive where several back issues are available in PDF format. Some articles/issues are only available to ATM members, while others (quite a few, actually!) are available to all, for free. In the archive, you can even take a closer look at the first issue (ever) of the journal, from 1955.

So, if you are interested in mathematics teaching in general (and in the UK in particular), you should definitely take a look! Hopefully, the archive will continue growing, and I wish other journals would follow up and do the same thing (preferably with a large collection of freely available back issues)!

The May issue of Teaching Statistics has arrived. This is not a journal I have followed in the past, I must admit, but there are some interesting articles in this issue. One article is entitled: “Inspired by Statistics?” The introduction to the article at least made me think:

What do you think of when you hear the word ‘statistics’?

Before
reading any further, give an instant view on how statistics makes you
feel and how your learners may feel. Why do you think the way you do
about statistics?

The article goes on to discuss views on statistics, before the author describes one of her favorite tasks about Minard’s map (a famous combined map, graph and chart that documents the losses suffered
by Napoleon’s army in his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812). She describes the way she planned and worked with this task in her teaching, and then finishes off with a discussion about inspiration for future tasks.