As Daniel Coyle recounts in his book, The Talent Code, “the answer came from an unlikely source: Edwin Albert Link, Jr., the son of a piano and organ maker from Binghamton, New York, who grew up in his father’s factory.” Link had a fascination for flying and took his first flying lesson at age 16.
On his first training flight he spent an hour in the air, but landed without ever once getting his hands on the controls. He concluded there had to be a better way to learn how to fly. This idea gnawed at him, and he tinkered in his father’s factory for seven years before building what later would become known as the “Link Trainer.”
The Link Trainer was basically a flight simulator—a tool that enabled untrained youth to practice learning how to fly in a low-risk environment. The Army Air Corps secured ten thousand Link Trainers and by the end of the war, more than five hundred thousand pilots had logged millions of practice hours. The Link Trainer, coupled with improved teaching methods, allowed us to meet the challenge.
We need the equivalent of the Link Trainer in mathematics if we are to meet the present challenge. I have been involved in helping children build a solid foundation in mathematics for more than two decades. My observation is that the problem we face is not on the teaching side. There is nothing wrong with the way the U.S. has taught math since the 1940’s. Generations of American children, schooled over the past 70 years in math, have put men on the moon and invented the integrated circuit chip, among thousands of other innovations.
I believe our nation’s fixation on teaching as the sole solution to building our children’s math skills is misplaced. The U.S. ranks low internationally in math competency because our youth do not practice.
I don’t know of any acquired skill, with the possible exception of breathing, that you can master without practice. Even learning to walk requires diligent practice. The average toddler will take three thousand steps and fall more than eighteen times in one day. Why should math be the outlier—the one skill you can master without practice
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent PISA study, the United States ranks 32 out of 65 countries in mathematics proficiency. Those at the top include the Chinese, specifically children in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Do these Chinese students have a math gene that accounts for their success?
The answer, not surprisingly, is no. The reason Shanghai ranks number one is because practice is embedded in the Chinese culture. The Chinese word for learning/study is made up of two characters: The first character stands for “accumulation of knowledge” and the second character stands for “constant practice, as in little birds learning to fly.”
- What WWII pilots can teach us about math education - June 3, 2014