New Math, Same As The Old Math

My son and I have a favorite T-shirt that we haven't managed to buy for one another. It says, "2+2=5 - for exceptionally large values of 2." It's the kind of thinking that makes sense for a family of non-math majors. To a certain degree, we are all happy to have the latitude to use our very extensive vocabularies to extrapolate and expand upon all the potential answers to life's problems. The facts of math and science make us all a little uncomfortable. That doesn't mean, however, that I have no appreciation for the concrete nature of these subjects. I was well on my way to being an exceptional math student when my personal life got in the way. The discipline that was required to study Elementary Functions was not available to my mind as a senior in high school. After years of tracking in the upper realms of whatever math courses were available, I opted to finish off my public education with a class called "Selected Topics In Math." It was a place holder, a review, for those who needed that math credit to get them into the college of their choice. Whereupon they could choose to take exactly no further math courses.
This was true to the absurd degree that I took a class that was listed in my university's catalog as "Astrophysics for non-math majors." It would be another ten years before I would need to remember the quadratic formula. That was when I decided to become a teacher. As it turns out, the powers that be would like teachers to know more about the subjects they teach than what he answer keys in the back of the Teacher's Edition of the textbook has to offer. Suddenly, I found myself in love once again with the precision of it all. The way those equations balanced and the steps that made complete sense when followed in the proper sequence. It turned out that being able to explain to kids why there was such a thing as a perfect square gave me peace. During my years as a fourth grade teacher, I reveled in the connections that math allowed me to bring to my ten-year-olds' minds. Getting them to fold pieces of construction paper to find their own equivalent fractions was more satisfying than I can describe.
And then our school district decided that they wanted to emphasize math facts. All that touchy-feely investigation was over, replaced by the rote memorization of rules and correct answers. Never mind the "why," just get to the bottom line already. This was one of the reasons why I didn't feel particularly sad about returning to the computer lab, leaving the regurgitation of times tables to those whose temperament was more suited to such things.  Every so often, I would take a fourth grader aside and try to blow his or her mind with the amazing correlations between the diameter and circumference of a circle, but mostly I returned to my life as a man of words.
Until last year, when the pendulum of education swung back. All of a sudden, they want kids to talk about how they figured out that whole two plus two thing. The "why" is back. And I don't really mind if it's always going to be four, as long as I get to talk about it.