The Washington Post has sure been publishing some good articles about today’s education debacles, which tells us that even the liberal establishment is waking up to the necessity of actually educating children, as opposed to what contemporary educational theory is doing.  Today’s edition included a feature entitled Parents Rise Up Against A New Approach to Math.  It’s about a math textbook entitled “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space.” It tackles the problem of  multiplying six times three, by having students make six marks on a piece of paper in a little box and to do that with three boxes.  Then count how many marks.  And it does away with the traditional way of adding big numbers, in which you put them into columns, add each one, and carry as needed.  Instead, students are taught to make pyramids, in which they first add up the ones, then the tens, then the hundreds, then the thousands, then put them all together.      Defenders say this method, which scorns memorizing “math facts,” teaches the concepts better.  But it makes math harder, not easier, and it is doing nothing to improve test scores.    I admit that classical education may be lagging in the math department.  The new classical schools are doing little with the Quadrivium, the other four liberal arts (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).  The Trivium, which is being implemented to great effect (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), has to do with mastering language and what you can do with it.  The Quadrivium has to do with mathematics (yes, even in the way music was taught).    This, I think, is the new frontier for classical educators.  Yes, there is Saxon math, but it seems traditional (which is better than the contemporary), rather than classical, as such.  Does anyone have any suggestions about what a classical approach to mathematics  might look like?

Fidel Castro Resigns Cuban Presidency. Who would have thought that he would peacefully retire, rather than being assassinated or overthrown in a revolution? Do you think communism will hang on in Cuba, or can we expect a revolution of freedom now that the old man is no longer running the firing squads?

My son-in-law and I explored the Antietam Battlefield  yesterday.  That site of the bloodiest day ever in American history, with 23,000 casualties, was amazing, humbling, sad, thrilling, inspiring.  We read Jeff Shaara’s account of the battle in his guide to Civil War battlefields, so we understood about the corn field, the sunken road, and Burnside’s bridge, still standing and upon which we walked, imagining the carnage it held (as well 

Just checking to see if people are so uneducated and unknowledgeable today about the lunar eclipse coming up that Columbus’s old gambit would still work:

An eclipse is credited with saving the life of Christopher Columbus and his crew in 1504. 

Stranded on the coast of Jamaica, the explorers were running out of food and faced with increasingly hostile local inhabitants who were refusing to provide them with any more supplies.

Columbus, looking at an astronomical almanac compiled by a German mathematician, realised that a total eclipse of the Moon would occur on February 29, 1504.

He called the native leaders and warned them if they did not cooperate, he would make the Moon disappear from the sky the following night.

The warning, of course, came true, prompting the terrified people to beg Columbus to restore the Moon — which he did, in return for as much food as his men needed. He and the crew were rescued on June 29, 1504.