kitchen table math, the sequel

Bedford Math

They're going to teach roman numerals even though roman numerals aren't included in Common Core.

Also, they're choosing between Singapore Math (Math in Focus) and Terc.

oy

AND SEE:
Irvington & Bedford

I'm seeing the same thing as Catherine: schools love khan.

Khan isn't going to teach k-8 kids anything, but schools love it anyway.

a) now they think they don't have to spend money on textbooks for elementary kids (first hand have heard that directly from a curriculum director)

b) now their teachers don't need to know how to do the math, khan will do it for them. (heard that directly from an instructional coach who champions Teach Like a Champion)

I know 2 other elementary teachers who love it because now they can do fun Terc things.

I only know one person who is anti Khan here in the establishment. Her very sane complaint: the man teaches completing the square without even drawing a square. It's nothing but computational and procedural fluency for him. It's the opposite of actual instruction, but now schools will use it and instruct even less.

I'm surprised nobody said one of Khan’s most significant achievements is that he has enormously expanded the world’s access to a master teacher.

from Science Daily:

Texas A and M University researchers ... have found that not fully understanding the "equal sign" in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math.

"About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students," note Robert M. Capraro and Mary Capraro of the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at Texas A&M.

[snip]

The problem is students memorize procedures without fully understanding the mathematics, he notes.

"Students who have learned to memorize symbols and who have a limited understanding of the equal sign will tend to solve problems such as 4+3+2=( )+2 by adding the numbers on the left, and placing it in the parentheses, then add those terms and create another equal sign with the new answer," he explains. "So the work would look like 4+3+2=(9)+2=11.

"This response has been called a running equal sign...

[snip]

The Texas A&M researchers examined textbooks in China and the United States and found "Chinese textbooks provided the best examples for students and that even the best U.S. textbooks, those sponsored by the National Science Foundation, were lacking relational examples about the equal sign."

Students' Understanding of the Equal Sign Not Equal, Professor Says
August 11, 2010

They had me until that last line.

How do Everyday Math and Terc teach the equal sign?

via StopTerc Nevada

"One recent morning, seven parents left their homes and jobs and drove to an administrative office here to sit through a two-hour tutorial on addition and subtraction." (comments needed )

This sounds like the start of a word problem!

Then how many hours will it take to tutor parents when they get to fractions? How many hours for algebra? What is the shape of this curve? (Hint: Can you say " exponential"?)="">

Bonus question:

How much steeper will the curve be if the school uses discovery methods during their parent tutorials?

Please use your critical thinking skills.

One recent morning, seven parents left their homes and jobs and drove to an administrative office here to sit through a two-hour tutorial on addition and subtraction.

They were not seeking a refresher on arithmetic, but rather a better understanding of the mathematics lessons their sons and daughters were studying in class and bringing home with them every night.

The adults from the Prince William County, Va., district, located in the suburbs of Washington, were taking part in a school-sponsored math workshop for parents—the sort of forum that has become a fixture in districts across the country. Schools and districts arrange the events to encourage parents to take an active role in their children’s math learning, as well as to answer questions and concerns about what students are being taught.

That outreach takes many forms. Some schools and districts organize family math nights, which bring students, teachers, and parents together, in the hope of making the subject less intimidating and more fun.

Other events, like the one in Prince William County reach out to parents through day, evening, or weekend workshops, and focus more specifically on math content.

[snip]

The district uses an elementary math curriculum called Investigations in Number, Data, and Space [TERC] that has roused strong objections from some parents, who say it sacrifices traditional arithmetic strategies for what they see as less appealing methods for building students’ math reasoning and problem-solving ability.

[snip]

One contributing factor has been a requirement by some schools that parents sign contracts to help their children with homework or take an active role in their academic work, Ms. Barber said. The introduction of new and unfamiliar math curricula, sometimes called "reform" approaches, has also compelled districts like Prince William to connect more with parents, she said.

"There's a recognition that we need to bring parents along in that way," Ms. Barber said.

Parents Schooled in Learning How to Help With Math
By Sean Cavanagh

I'm pretty sure schools can't "require" parents to teach math.

But if they're going to "require" it, they better let us in on the curriculum selections.

Here's Barry's comment:

Parents are working with their children to teach them the math that is not being taught in schools. Compounding the problem is that a child still has to turn in homework, so the parent has to figure out what is going on in the classroom. Since Investigations, (and Everyday Math for that matter) do not have textbooks, if a child didn't understand that they were supposed to do, then the parent is in the dark as to how to approach the homework. This is very common in Everyday Math which would give students problems for which they had not had instruction, like 8.75/0.5. What they had learned to do in class was solve it as 875/5, and then using deduction and some "number sense", figure out where the decimal point would go in the quotient.

Such a cart before the horse approach to math education is tantamount to throwing a kid in a swimming pool and telling him or her that now would be a good time to learn some basic swim techniques.

School districts and publishers spin what's happening as "parent involvement" and isn't it just wonderful. What's really happening is parents are involved because the schools have totally abdicated their responsibility to teach math. And one can't really blame the schools: NSF funded these atrocities and their imprimatur seems to convince otherwise intelligent people that this total garbage has some merit.

And, from another satisfied customer:

The reason they are holding workshops is to try and diffuse the fury over math investigations. Our children are not learning the basics and without being able to add, they cannot get a deeper understanding.

The math department has created a massive divide in our county and destroyed our childrens math abilities at the same time; nice going.

As for the Evidence for Success brochure that they tout as research, most of those districts have dropped or are dropping MI and the rest are heavily funded title 1 districts or only have a few schools. A parent contacted every one of them.

Note that there were no comments from dissenting parents in that article; totally biased. We look forward to returning to real mathematics so we don't have to teach so much at home.

Numerous parents here have spent years lobbying our high-performing, generously-funded district ($22,000 per pupil spending) to move to the international standard for math education. That being: algebra in the 8th grade.

We have approximately 30% of our 8th graders taking algebra. The figure at KIPP, in the Bronx, is 80%. ($10,000 per pupil spending, roughly)

They're not going to do it. They're so not going to do it they're not even going to say 'no.' They're just not going to do it.

While we're on the subject of well-funded school districts saying 'no,' I should add that the middle school is also not going to allow more students to take Earth Science in the 8th grade. Only forty-eight students, of 150 or so, currently take Earth Science, compared to 100% of students in Pelham. However, in the view of the school that is 48 students too many. As the chair of the science department told us, "If it were up to me, I wouldn't offer accelerated courses to any students in the middle school, but this community demands it."

The district argues, in meetings with parents, that learning depends upon maturity. Not all students are mature enough to learn Earth Science in the 8th grade. Or algebra.

Of course, maturity has nothing to do with ability to learn, as the National Math Advisory Panel reports. However, maturity has everything to do with a student being able to monitor his learning instead of depending on his teacher to perform this function. So, yes. It's easier to teach Earth Science to a high school sophomore than to a student in the 8th grade.

So why do parents continue to lobby school districts across the land to teach serious courses to younger kids?

What is the big deal, after all, about taking algebra in the 8th grade?

What's the difference when you take algebra so long as you get around to it sometime before college?


Brain Rules

It turns out there is a very good answer to that question.

It takes years to consolidate a memory. Not minutes, hours, or days but years. What you learn in first grade is not completely formed until your sophomore year in high school.

Rule # 6: Remember to repeat
John Medina

Bingo.

Here we have one of those facts of life many of us have picked up over the years but can neither verbalize in conversation with school officials nor defend as true, primarily because we don't realize we know it.

We don't know what we know. ^*

On the other hand, when we hear someone else verbalize it, we recognize it as true of our own experience. At least, I did, when I read this statement by James Milgram:

First of all, I claim that taking -- even asking to take it out of the curriculum -- shows a profound ignorance of the subject of mathematics. The point is, in mathematics, many, many skills develop over an extended period of time and are not really fully exploited until perhaps 10, 12, or even 15 years after they've been introduced. Some skills begin to develop in the first or second grade and they do not come to fruition or see their major applications until maybe the second year of college. This happens a lot in mathematics and long division is one of the key examples.

I'm going to guess that this is another reason why Singapore students are so far ahead of American students. Singapore students are doing simple algebra in the 5th grade. They're doing simple algebra in the 5th grade, and they're not dipping in and out of simple algebra, either; they're not being "exposed" to "algebraic thinking."

They're learning what they're learning to mastery.

At age 10.


^* not to be confused with known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.

In the TIMES today, NYC schools get their first value-added report cards:

The grades released yesterday contained many surprises, with some schools with top-notch reputations receiving B’s, C’s, D’s — and even F’s, to the astonishment of some parents.

That is because unlike traditional methods of judging schools, this one involves a complex calculation that assigns the most weight to how individual students improve in a year’s time on standardized state tests. It also compares schools with similar populations, as judged by demographics and incoming students’ test scores, and assigns final grades based on a curve. More than 60 percent of the schools earned A’s or B’s.

[snip]

Mr. Bloomberg said that the reports were devised to give parents crucial insight into their schools, and that if the grades upended longstanding school reputations, well, that was precisely the point. “We should be asking ourselves why some of the schools we thought were doing well aren’t serving students as effectively as other similar schools,” he said. Still, some parents lashed out at the enterprise, saying it overemphasized standardized tests.

“The way you treat our educators is part and parcel of the way you treat our students — constantly barraging them with narrow, deadening tests and demoralizing them with meaningless scores,” Jan Carr, whose son attends the Salk School of Science, a coveted Manhattan middle school that received a C, wrote in a letter to the chancellor.

[snip]

Several esteemed elementary schools that middle-class parents often factor in to their real estate decisions — including Public School 6 on the Upper East Side, P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side, P.S. 234 in TriBeCa and P.S. 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, — received B’s. Other popular schools fared worse. P.S. 154 in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, received a D, as did Central Park East I in Harlem.

Yes indeed.

P.S. 234 in TriBeCa.

Ground Zero in the NYC math wars.

A whole lotta tutors there at P.S. 234, and they still swing only a B.

The fact is in District 2 our kids are learning math like champs. Our scores are extraordinary,” said Daria Rigny, District 2 superintendent.

But the whispers in the schoolyards are that the high scores owe much to the widespread use of tutors.

“If you just studied TERC and took the test for Stuyvesant you wouldn’t be prepared. The only way is to be tutored,” said Jonathan Levine, the father of one current and two former P.S. 234 students. He says this makes two tracks, those who tutor and those who don’t.

One math tutor who works with many Downtown kids said most of her students are 4th and 5th graders whose parents worry that they will be unprepared for state tests and middle school. “They don’t even tell me what it is they want them to learn. They just say ‘could you teach them the math that I learned?”’ The tutor, who did not want to be identified, said some kids do struggle with TERC. “They try to show me how they solve problems in their classes and half the time they don’t understand it.”

I still don't see how value-added assessment adequately controls for tutors.



50 New York Schools Fail Under Rating System

Where is the Photoshop comment?

Which thread?

I need it!

(This was the mom who was so ticked off at her child's TERC homework that she wrote nasty stuff all over it, then had to Photoshop the damn thing to give her kid a clean copy to turn in to the teacher.)

Where is it????


got it

my kids home work tonight (which I wrote nasty things on - then scanned it in and use photoshop to remove - to reprint it so my kid can hand it in) entailed ...

drum roll ...

FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS TO WRITE EACH NUMBER.

(ok some comment here - my kid will LITERALLY follow the directions - earnest to do so too)

2. Skip count 87 times by tens.There are 5 ones. The number is _________.

4. Skip count 99 times by tens. There are 9 ones. The number is _______.


I've given my kid 3 pages of Singapore 2b review to do and those are stapled to her original homework with the aforementioned questions crossed off in red permanent marker.

My kid does well with Kumon too and did well with Saxon / Singapore blend over the summer.

Now if only during the school day her time wasn't being wasted (then again, maybe its not - maybe they are doing Addison Wesley in the classroom and sending home the TERC 2).

I would love for a reformist to explain the logic of the above problems given that the other 4 problems were :

Skip count 3 times by hundreds. Skip count 2 times by tens. There is a 9 in the ones place. The Number is ___________.

I've considered going to the Board of Ed and skip counting 87 times by tens, because THATS WHAT FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS means to a child.^*

It would make a great YouTube video, because when I was still counting and the timer was up on my public comment allotment I am sure the BOE president would say, could you hurry up or get to the point ...

which would be the point.

^* Actually, that's what it means to me, too.

yours for $3.95 at Zazzle

You people clearly don't appreciate creativity.

--rightwingprof re: Why we hate it

“They want their children’s education to resemble their education because they are successful,” [Rosenstein] explained. “They say, ‘It worked for me, why won’t it work for them?’ ”

source:
Battle Over Math in New Jersey Drives off a New Schools Chief

............................

Joseph G. (Joe) Rosenstein

I have been a member of the Mathematics Department of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for the past 37 (!) years.

(The photograph was taken at the launch of the MetroMath Center in November 2003; it looks like I was directing a performance of the MetroMath anthem, but I was just speaking enthusiastically about the Center's vision and goals. MetroMath is described later on this page.)

In the research portion of my career, I wrote a number of articles and published a research monograph Linear Orderings (Academic Press, 1982) in textbook form.

For nearly 20 years I have been heavily involved in K-12 education. This came about as a result of my serving as Director of the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics. (Details are in my vita.) In recent years, I have been involved in the following five major kinds of enterprises that are described in more detail below:

• organizing and directing professional development programs for K-12 teachers of mathematics,
• strengthening mathematics education in New Jersey through developing the NJ Mathematics Curriculum Framework,
• directing the New Jersey Mathematics Coalition,
• organizing and serving as founding director of the MetroMath Center, and
• writing instructional materials for K-12 teachers focused on discrete mathematics.

(In another arena, I have developed and published a new prayerbook for the morning service of Shabbat and festivals entitled Siddur Eit Ratzon; it is available for review and purchase at www.newsiddur.org.)

............................

And see: Beyond TERC

Joseph G. (Joe) Rosenstein homepage
Joseph G. (Joe) Rosenstein at ktm-2
thanks, Joe

“You have to question how much further they’d be willing to go to advance their cause,” Mark Bombace, the school board president, said in an interview. “And that is very disturbing to someone who has spent his life trying to do the right thing for children.”

And the other side is NOT trying to do the right thing for children? If these parents cared only about their own kids, they would keep quiet, tutor their kids, and laugh all the way to the SAT test.

"...the parents flooded the Internet"

Boy, there are a lot of parents who apparently don't want to do the right thing for children.

“They want their children’s education to resemble their education because they are successful,” he explained. “They say, ‘It worked for me, why won’t it work for them?’ ”

Stupid or arrogant. They like to view the problem as what was done long ago versus what is done today, rather than Investigations versus Singapore Math. The real issue is low expectations versus high expectations.

“We’re trying to move this to a problem-solving process rather than having a fight or a battle,”

Why wasn't it a problem-solving process from the beginning? Could it be that the board didn't think there was a problem? Why did the battle begin in the first place?


Battle Over Math in New Jersey Drives Off a New Schools Chief