TAUGHT LIKE A GAME

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XX, Issue 46, 6 February 1930, Page 10

TAUGHT LIKE A GAME

ARITHMETIC MADE EASY NEW METHOD TESTED, ENGINEER IS INVENTOR. A new method of teaching arithmetic is being tested in Mexico Citj schools to determine whether .t should displace methods like those used in the United States and elsewhere. The new method eliminates oldfashioned muultiplicatiou and division tables and teaches the real meaning of products and quotients by a set of rectangular wooden pieces. The child is introduced to these as to a game. The pieces have pictures on them, which are linked in the child’s mind by a jolly story. The pieces are also of certain colours, which always go with certain sizes. On the back these are marked off in little squares to give the real value of each piece. Thus by colour, size, and picture, the child knows whether a piece is five, ten, or one, or combinations of these, and by the formation of new squares and rectangles he learns mul tiplication, and by taking them apart, division. These values, learned by experience are easily remem bered and in much less time than it takes to memorise meaningless multiplication and division tables. Once thoroughly mustered, the set of squares is put aside as a plaything. The author of this method, says the “Christian Science Monitor," is Jose Joaqnn Terrazas, Mexican engineer and mathematician. Forty years ago he decided that multiplication tables should be abolished, and that the energy spent in learning hard and meaningless abstractions would be better Saved for some more useful purpose. , His methods include not only this elementary scheme for learning to multiply and divide small numbers, for he also has easy schemes for long division and multiplication, and he expects to carry his methods of simplification into higher mathematics After he had tried for forty years to get his methods before educational authorities, a Mexican normal school teacher and mathematics expert, Miss Adelia Palacious, became interested in them, and demonstrated them before a congress of secondary school teachers in New Orleans recently. They attracted considerable attention, so she had the method patented in Washington for Mr Terrazas. AWAIT FURTHER PROOFS. Since August of last year the new method has been used iu an experimental way by about 120 school teachers on about 1500 children of the second and third grades, and with astonishing success. But because the thing is still too new, and changes in educational theory must go slow, the Federal Ministry of Public Education is waiting for more experience and still further proofs. Miss Sara Miranda, director of a primary school used as an experimental centre for the Mexican National University, has charts to show the relative progress made by child ren under each method. She finds that second grade child ren who had not yet learned the multiplication or division tables, were distinctly superior to third grade children who had, after thirty lessons under the new system. In the course of another two months, both groups of children continued to improve, but the younger children under the new system remained superior to the older group. COMPETE WITH ADULTS. Miss Palacios states that children who were unable to master the oldfashioned tables made satisfactory progress in the new. The charts of Miss -Miranda’s school show that problems that it took the older group 35 minutes to do in the old way, it took the younger children 15 minutes to do in the new. Public arithmetic tests have just been held to show the value of the new methods in the case af about SOO second and third grade children of the city’s primary schools. Hardly was a problem called off before all hands shot up in unison. Once when the teacher deliberately made a mistake, an immediate, unanimous, disgusted howl rocked the school walls. The inventor himself was there, anil had two little girls aged 8 and a boy aged 10, and another 12, do long division and multiplication in competition with a school teacher working at another blackboard. The first problem, in which one of the eight-year-old girls and the grown woman teacher competed, was to multiply 40,596 by 83,095. The child finished first, as did the other three children in the succeeding tests. These children had had three months of the new method, while the school teacher employed the old. The results s- far indicate that th" new method allows greater speed, less effort, and more rapid advancement. The method seems very complicated to adults who see it for the first time. The Ministry of Education is making a careful investigation, for on its decision rests the future of the method in the schools.