Gary Bettman being spineless isn't a notable enough development to merit its own link, but the article was a good read anyway.
Now for the math article.
I will say straight off that the article pisses me off on several fronts. Not that it entirely lacks points, by any means, but there's just so much wrong with it and a good deal that makes me personally annoyed.
I will start out by saying that I'm just glad nobody tried to teach math to me as a pure art because I'd have been turned off it pretty badly. I really only gained a love for the "art" side it has after understanding the rational rules. The author wants math classes to be art classes, which... well, there's a reason the only people who take art classes are the small minority of the population who are really into it. And if you're fine with doing that for math too, okay, sure whatever. There's a heck of a lot of fields that require more mathematical knowledge than that, though, and it's a dramatically harder thing to pick up at an older age (because, y'know, it is a language), so I think there's something to be said for teaching it to a larger pool of people at least for a certain length of time. (I'm pretty open to debate on how long that time should be, granted.)
The article pops off on the usual (valid) criticism of learning math, that most people will just never use this stuff (which is true, past elementary school roughly). Of course, a minority of people do, and for the rest, math education is just largely a code for "learning how to solve problems", which by the way, does not just mean coming up with your own proofs, but much more simple "take the rules you have learned and apply them", which is pretty darn valuable and you use it all the time unconsciously whether you realise it or not.
Extra venom is needed when this guy pretty much says that the only people teaching math should be people who have "proved something themselves" which I am assuming translates as "got themselves published doing mathematical research" because we totally needed more emphasis on research over teaching at the post-secondary level. I thought university was crappy enough, thanks. (And before someone says that the author meant "sat down and proved something for themselves"... no he didn't, because everyone I know who loves math and wants to teach it has done so, my class of math educators pretty much all had plenty of stories to share in that regard.)
So yeah, the article generally strikes a sour note, always lovely to be told that I am a cog of some evil machine I don't understand, that is totally why I spend time each week reading over the discussions of teaching methods and delightful tricks to teach and prove things to students and elicit that "aha!" moment (by the way, the article had a couple of these, always good to see).
The main place I see to agree is that it would be seriously awesome if I could devote more classes to just having students prove random things in group discussions, that is always great fun. There are many problems with it, though, which prevent me from doing it too often:
1. It's basically impossible to assess, and sadly, you lose lots of students of the age range I teach if they figure out it's not for marks. (Of course, the merits of our marks-driven education system are something that I can see being highly debated, but that's a bigger problem than this article seeks to address.)
2. The activity is somewhat hostage to the fact that most things you have students prove, some will have already seen proofs for, remember, and regurgitate (which is fine, to a point, but it does lose the creative process if that is the goal. Also makes the amount of time the activity takes seriously vary.)
3. While fun, it is inherently a slower way to cover and master material than "normal" teaching methods. When teaching a class there is a lot of material I am obligated to cover (both to the students themselves, and the state which set the curriculum) so time is always a concern.
4. In my experience, students who aren't at least moderately into the subject don't get into such activities at all and it becomes a waste for them; at best they follow what the "brighter" students are doing but often not even that. I kinda think such activities are wonderful for a motivated class (such as an enriched class obviously) and likely would work well in the lower grades (where more students tend to be more motivated to learn for learning's sake) but that's not really my area of expertise.
But in general the article seems pretty divorced for such real-life concerns, while also pushing its singular view of mathematics on the rest of us and generally presuming to understand the teaching of mathematics far better than anyone who actually does it.
