Late to the party, but did the schools in your district have to get into conflict to reject Connected Math?

Who adopts textbooks?

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Jun 2005

Oh, I'm sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, that they didn't jump on the bandwagon with CMP is a good sign.

-- CarolynMorgan - 04 Jun 2005

Hi Carolyn! I feel the same way you do about Connected Math. There are, as far as I could determine, 3 schools in our district that have refused to teach Connected Math, and I fought to get Ben into one of them (the one that's teaching from Prentice-Hall). Rest assured that if CMP had been our only option, I would have home schooled. I still may do it, in the end.

-- CarolynJohnston - 03 Jun 2005

By the way, so much of the first half of Saxon 7/6 is review of what was in 6/5, my own 5th graders work in it often with no difficulty. You could probably do it in a summer, or at least most of it.

-- CarolynMorgan - 03 Jun 2005

You know that Connected Mathematics is a constructivist program. David Klein writes about it; Mathematically Correct gives it an F as a 7th grade curriculum; and Reformk12.com has a critique of it in their June 22, 2004 post. Read it at www.reformk12/archives/000165.nclk It was a disaster for the students in the highly esteemed Plano TX School District, where parents had wars over what had happened to their kids. WhatWorksClearinghouse^? has a report on their website where they record time after time where the tests were flawed with respect to comparison groups using CM. Look up Penfield NY on the web. I could go on and on. I urge you to consider homeschooling your son. You can do it. On the other hand, you could pay the price of going through this with him for the sake of knowing first hand how to help the readers of your blogsight when they're up against reform math. It may be a very high price to pay. I'm afraid I've been awfully blunt in this post. I'm just a "traditional" Math teacher who is passionate about seeing students succeed in Math and feel successful. Good luck to you and God bless.

-- CarolynMorgan - 03 Jun 2005

SummerSupplement

Ive been looking around a bit for an alternative to Saxon 76 for summer math practice. This was mainly because we only have 3 months, and Saxon homeschool books have well over a hundred lessons in them -- I would have had to go through it, picking what lessons to skip, and I'd rather not.

I decided to take the opportunity to introduce the math series Ben is going to be using in his middle school math classes: Prentice-Hall Mathematics. Our school district has widely adopted Connected Math for grades 6-8, and I fought hard to get Ben into one of the two remaining schools in our district that use a standard curriculum. But it occurred to me the other day that I know very little about this school's curriculum choice: subconsciously, I guess I'd decided that any school with the sense not to jump on the CMP bandwagon could be trusted to choose a decent math curriculum.

But of course, there's no being sure about that. The world isn't black and white, and there's more than one way to mess up a math curriculum. But I did as well as I could do within this district, and now I need to find out what we're in for.

So I ordered a copy today of Prentice-Hall Mathematics, Course 1.

I must say, the table of contents is right up my alley:

1. Decimals
2. Algebra: Patterns and Variables
3. Number Theory and Fractions
4. Adding and Subtracting Fractions
5. Multiplying and Dividing Fractions
6. Ratios, Proportions, and Percents
7. Data and Graphs
8. Tools of Geometry
9. Geometry and Measurement
10. Algebra: Integers
11. Exploring Probablilty
12. Algebra: Equations and Inequalities


Short and to the point, with an early emphasis on the critical topic, fractions. Though we could probably do with a break of a year or two from Exploring any more Probability, but that's just too much to hope for.

FreeWorksheets
TreadingWater

SummerSupplementTime
SummerSupplementTimePart2
SummerSupplementTimePart3
SummerSupplementTimePart4 (resources for kids who have fallen behind)
SummerSupplementTimePart5 (resources for preventing summer regression)

SaxonPlacementTestsAndGuides
SingaporeMathPlacementTest

TeachYourChildToTypeThisSummer

<!--

• Posted by: CarolynJohnston
• LogDate: Jun 02, 2005 @ 23:44