Sunday Samples 3
Since I quoted it in the title of a post this past week, I thought I’d throw out one of Tom Lehrer’s classics.
Lehrer earned his B.A. in mathematics from Harvard at 18, then his M.A. the next year. He never did complete his doctorate, but taught low-level courses at a number of schools. All of this made it into his music, including the odd take on the world at large common to a certain streak of mathematicians.
One of his most directly mathematical pieces was a sendup of the “New Math” movement in elementary mathematics teaching. It was pretty thoroughly ill-conceived, mostly because the teachers themselves didn’t know some of the concepts the curriculum drafters were pushing. The concepts themselves were useful, but it ended up replacing (rather than supplementing) time spent teaching actual arithmetic and the like. Scraps of it still live on, but as a whole the concept was a failure.
And so, after the jump, Tom Lehrer’s “New Math”.
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