A Modest Fraction Proposal?

Has everyone read the USA Today article on Dennis DeTurck? (Here’s another, more in-depth, article from Delaware Online.) Dude is the DEAN of the College of Arts and Sciences at UPenn — check out his homepage. He seems to be advocating the removal of fractions from the curriculum.

There’s been lots of passionate exposition about the place of fractions in math education at Good Math, Bad Math, and I’ll get in there and rant about the state of math ed with the best of them. Fractions are crucial, and we need to stop accepting the idea that “fractions are hard and kids will always have trouble with them.” Not teaching fractions because we now have calculators is like  — no, worse than — not teaching literature because it takes a long time to read a book & now it’s just easier to watch movies.

But I’m starting to think we’ve all been had, Jonathan Swift-style. Remember Swift’s essay, “A Modest Proposal” in which he proposes that starving Irish people might make things easier on themselves by selling their children as food for the wealthy?  It caused quite a stir, but it turned out to be satire.  Swift made an absurd proposal to demonstrate exactly the opposite point.  I wonder if Dr. DeTurck may be pulling the same stunt.

Dr. DeTurck very well may be serious, but I started wondering when he said that the teaching of fractions should be delayed until a student can understand them, “perhaps after a student learns Calculus.” Haha, good one, Dr. DeTurck — you almost had me. You CAN’T learn Calculus without understanding fractions!! You can’t even learn a whole heck of a lot of algebra, let alone trigonometry, without fractions. Surely he is not serious. Is he?? Is it possible that he’s making a wildly absurd proposal just to show how ridiculous that type of thinking is when taken to an extreme? I don’t know, but it makes me wonder. I would hope so.

This seems like a good place to mention Isaac Asimov’s short story The Feeling of Power. Go read it!