http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-US.pdfThis might be of interest. Especially this paragraph:
"Students in the United States have particular strengths in cognitively less-demanding mathematical skills
and abilities, such as extracting single values from diagrams or handling well-structured formulae. They
have particular weaknesses in items with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations,
translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems."
This really rings a bell for me. Math is too often regarded as a set of facts and procedures to remember, and to quickly recall. This is not the essence of math. Speed has little to do with math. Period. Especially in an environment where students learned their math facts and then never go to a math class without a calculator. I'd rather the teachers/schools/educators in general less obsessed about memorizing computational facts at an early age, but instead let students do their own calculations from K to 12 without using calculators. This way the facts are gradually built and used and reinforced and no one sweats over how many seconds it takes to complete a work sheet.
My kids are not slow calculators, but are not super fast either. I hear my DD8 tell me that she is not the best math student in class because who and who finish the minute math quicker. I just tell her that one can be good without being quick (she is doing middle school math at home).
