Jennifer Lewis has a PhD in teacher education and mathematics
education from the University of Michigan, where she teaches classes
and conducts research in mathematics education. She also works in
Jewish education through her affiliation with the Mandel Foundation.
Before that, Jenny taught public school for ten years. She is married
to Marc Bernstein and together they have four children. This article appears in issue 7 of Conversations, the journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals.
New ideas about the teaching and learning of mathematics present challenges for Orthodox schools. In part, these ideas about the teaching and learning of mathematics are challenging to any schools: teachers lack content knowledge in the subject because they have had insufficient opportunities to learn themselves; teachers are strained pedagogically to teach a subject that they learned differently as students; ambitious aims for subject matter learning compete with a whole host of educational issues that need no enumeration here. For Orthodox schools, new understandings about cognition and learning are particularly fraught.
