Word: math
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...statistician. Up north, in Ellensburg, Wash., William Martin was the same sort of fellow. He was a good chess player and a mean hand at the piano, and he made a hobby of hypnotism. At the University of Washington he worked hard at his studies, was a topnotch math and science student. When the two young bachelors met during Navy duty in Japan, they became fast friends. When they both signed up to work for the super-secret National Security Agency in Washington three years ago, they seemed ready and willing to settle down to a life of official, patriotic...
...contrast is the new Wayland (Mass.) High School, a remarkable $2,360,000 layout (capacity: 850), due to open this month 16 miles from Boston. Designed by Walter Gropius's Architects Collaborative, Wayland is a modified "campus plan" of six separate buildings, organized according to subjects (arts, language, math and sciences, etc.). Each center has varying-sized rooms with movable walls-a big lecture hall, small seminar rooms, a "resource area" for individual projects. Equipment is lavish; the arts center has a theater and a TV studio...
Incorporated by some top U.S. executives, such as RCA President John Burns, SAAC's first camp has 225 youngsters studying Russian, science, math, logic, writing, politics, art and music under 14 expert teachers and 20 junior counselors. (Tuition for six weeks: $195.) If some parents were at first appalled at the agenda, they have changed their minds. Asked one mother last week: "What have you done with my child? He was absolutely exhausted when he got home, and then he spent two hours telling us what he did today. Whatever happened to summer boredom...
Child's Language. As Beberman sees it, conventional high-school math "turns out rigid little computers with a limited range of programs." Often detesting the subject, teachers view it as such a painful manipulation of inscrutable symbols that they miss the underlying concepts. They either teach it mechanically or try to liven it up with "interesting" problems, e.g., computing interest. Such teaching is completely alien to the child's mind, says Beberman. "Children are not miniature adults. They have a thirst for the abstract and the world of fancy." They may even grasp math relationships faster than reading...
...well does it work? In the past five years, Beberman's students at the university's laboratory school have won first prize four times in Illinois in the Mathematics Association of America's national math contest, won second prize the fifth time. "Teaching is not lecturing or telling things," says he. "Teaching is devising a sequence of questions which enables kids to become aware of generalizations by themselves...