Teaching Gap

I am reading a really great book for one of my master's classes. It's called "The Teaching Gap" and it's about the latest TIMSS study, where 8th grade math classrooms in the US, Japan, and Germany were videotaped, analyzed, and compared. Part of the justification for the study is that teaching in the US is in need of an overhaul, but not everybody agrees on that. This book spends some time on the interesting concept that teaching is a cultural activity. There is a distinctly American pattern of teaching, just like there is a distinctly Japanese way and a German way. There are some similarities between the three, and some differences. The major difference between the US pattern and the Japanese pattern is that here in the US, the person in charge of doing the math is the teacher. In Japan, the teacher puts a problem up, reminds the students of how they solved a similar problem yesterday, and then lets them go. But back to the cultural thing... I don't think that as a nation we have addressed the fact that our schools were created to educate a specific population of white males. Teachers back then were white and female. Teachers now are still overwhelmingly white and female, and our methods have not changed much. The student base, however, is dramatically different. I agree with the authors in the end - a major overhaul is needed. I think I will start by allowing my students to struggle more - something that is suspiciously absent in the American pattern of teaching math.