History of whole numbers and teachers' views related to teaching the subject of whole numbers

In the world and Turkey, many students think that math is difficult and are concerned about being unsuccessful and so develop a negative attitude to math. Even worse, they reach t5he conclusion that they are not clever enough to learn math and math is not one of the subjects which they can do. This situation begins with primary education and continues increasingly as the school years pass, unfortunately (Baykul, 2002). Change and development has continued rapidly in our country and in the world as well. These changes have influence on curriculums. There have been changes for math schedule such in other fields, in accord with the innovations, in the new primary education program which has been put into action as from 2005. When content of the new program has been analyzed, it has been seen that there have been some changes on teaching and instructing method for subject of whole numbers. There is limited number of study on whole numbers in our country. When the studies on whole numbers are analyzed, it will be seen that these studies are generally on different teaching methods and techniques and these studies are in limited number. Subject of whole numbers takes a large place in the math teaching program of secondary education. In this study, it has been examined historical development of whole numbers subject and secondary education math teachers' views in analyzing the period past-to-date. This kind of study hasn't been seen in this area while relevant literature scanning. This situation presents importance of this study. It is thought that this study will present an important data source to the studies done on this subject and make an important contribution to math education. In this study, interview method that is one of the qualitative research methods has been used in order to determine views of secondary education math teachers related to whole numbers. Participants of the research are 30 teachers of secondary education who were working in city center school of Bingöl in the 2013-2014 academic years. In the study, semi-structured interview form developed by researcher has been used as data collection tool. Analysis of the collected data is composed of two steps in the study. In the first step, survey model has been used in order to reach history and curriculum. As for the second step, descriptive analysis has been used in order to emphasize what do the data collected in the study say related to the research problem or which results are demonstrated, in other words in order to seek an answer to the "what" question. In consequence of the study, it has been seen that the subject of whole numbers has a serious past, historically. They have indicated that secondary education math teachers don't benefit from constructivist system in general while teaching the subject of whole numbers, benefit from modeling on the subject of whole numbers, haven't got any visual material for the subject of whole numbers and therefore they supply the materials in general and it is suitable in terms of sequence of attainment. It has been determined that subject of whole numbers is not completely suitable for lesson books, activities take long time, innovations are found suitable in the curriculum. In general, math teachers of secondary education have indicated that they approve the recent innovations in the math curriculum. Keywords: Whole numbers, history of whole numbers, development period of whole numbers.