Rich Zahradnik

Tom Lehrer, brilliant satirical songwriter and very smart mathematician, penned these words:

It won’t do you a bit of good to review math.

It’s so simple,

So very simple,

That only a child can do it!

Pelham parents struggling to help their elementary kids with the Math Investigations textbooks would be forgiven if they thought Lehrer wrote the lyrics yesterday. As he says in his introduction to the song, which is about a subtraction problem, “but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what youre doing rather than to get the right answer.”

Read the rest of my column at Singing the Blues About Pelhams Elementary Math Program – Pelham, NY Patch.