New Math

Your article “What Ever Happened to New Math” (December 1990) brought back memories, pleasant and otherwise, of my days as a “new-math kid” while growing up in Fresno, California. Because I was not introduced to new math until I began algebra in the eighth grade, my adjustment was not as traumatic as that of my classmates struggling with the new-math approach to seventh- and eighth-grade arithmetic, learning such useful concepts as counting in the base-twelve number system. Mr. Miller made one error in his article, however. He stated that SMSG referred to something he characterized as the School Mathematics Study Group. This is utter nonsense. As any student attending Alexander Hamilton Junior High School in Fresno during the early sixties could tell you, SMSG stood for only one thing: “Some Math, Some Garbage.”