Comments

I've noticed that it is important to your child to have your method be consistent with the method being taught by their teacher. For younger children it seems to be difficult for them to realize that there can be multiple ways of accomplishing the same goal

-- StudentSteve - 22 Jun 2006

For younger children it seems to be difficult for them to realize that there can be multiple ways of accomplishing the same goal

-- StudentSteve^? - 22 Jun 2006

Wow. In my experience, having taught my own children using Singapore Math and it's multiple approaches to solving problems, I would have to disagree.

-- NicksMama - 22 Jun 2006

Student Steve,

I believed that for a long time, but when I just taught the foundational skills the other curriculum was attempting to teach using another (better) curriculum I found that my children did much better. For me, experience says the opposite. Unless you're using a bad curriculum.

Unfortunately, some of the textbooks being used today are very confusing to a lot of kids even though they look fantastic to some adults. When I just took the bull by the horns and used Saxon combined with Singapore after school, my son jumped up a full 2 years in skills.

I think you are right that it is probably more helpful to stay with whatever skills are being taught, but if the school is doing a poor job of it or they are such slaves to various goofy state standards that some states insist on having (i.e. major emphasis on statistics, probability, graphs, language arts problem-solving while skipping algorithms, long division, and other fundamentals mastery) then you have to find another, more effective curriculum to shore up the gaps or your kid is headed for a massive wall by Algebra 1.

-- SusanS - 22 Jun 2006

Unfortunately, some of the textbooks being used today are very confusing to a lot of kids even though they look fantastic to some adults.

I'm an adult, and the math textbooks today look like something designed by colorblind monkeys on crack. So many brightly colored pictures, irrelevant photos, etc. that it's hard to find the actual math content.

Our math texts in the dark ages (1970s - 1980s) had at most one irrelevant photo per chapter, and that was on the chapter heading page, e.g. a dangling chain to illustrate a catenary.

The books we had back then used only two colors of ink, black and red, and the only pictures were graphs of functions or sketches of geometric figures required to illustrate the problem, e.g. "The line passing through points A and B is tangent to the circle with center O and radius r at point P..."

-- GoogleMaster - 22 Jun 2006

"I'm an adult, and the math textbooks today look like something designed by colorblind monkeys on crack. So many brightly colored pictures, irrelevant photos, etc. that it's hard to find the actual math content."

This was exactly my reaction to my daughter's fifth grade math textbook! Well, okay, I'm not creative enough to have come up with the "colorblind monkeys" analogy, but . . .

At some point during that year I was at a teaching workshop (for college types) and a psychology professor was also in attendance. Somehow, the subject of "busy textbooks" came up and she remarked that the brain can only take in and process so much information at a time. IIRC, the gist of her comments seemed to be that such textbooks weren't at all conducive to learning, at least from a cognitive psychology point of view.

In my naivete, I remember wondering why textbook publishers and curricula folks wouldn't be paying more attention to the cognitive psychologists.

-- KarenA - 22 Jun 2006

"In my naivete, I remember wondering why textbook publishers and curricula folks wouldn't be paying more attention to the cognitive psychologists."

Many (perhaps most) of the problems we are having in education result in large part from the customer not being the consumer:

• Textbooks are purchased by textbook commissions, who don't ever have to use the books. The teachers and students who do have to use the books are not involved in the selection process.
• Teacher retention decisions are made by administrators, not by the students or their parents. (For obvious maturity-related reasons, allowing the students to make this decision would be, at best, questionable.)
• Graduation criteria are set not by the people who have to trust (or not) the meaning of the credential of the graduate, but by random district of state bureaucrats. Most of these people do not ever have to hire HS graduates immediately after graduation.

Allowing limited school choice moves the decision closer to the consumer in some issues, but there is still a tremendous disconnect between decision and consequence even in those cases. Which Everyday-Math school would you like to enroll in, again?

-- DougSundseth - 22 Jun 2006

This business with textbooks is also something that parents know really nothing about, so you can't even call it an elephant in a room. They all look alike, they all sound alike, they all align with the almighty state standards, and on and on.

When I hear parent frustration it is always about more funding, bad parents, bad teachers, bad principals, but never bad textbooks. Mostly because they don't know where to begin or how to assess any of them.

Since I have hung out here long enough, I have actually tried to help some other parents determine if the textbook their kid is using is part of the problem. The first thing I ask them is what curriculum they are using, what is the actual name of the book. Even the smartest parents almost never get back to me about it and I do ask a couple of times before I just give up. This has happened a few times and I find it fascinating. They know how to complain about bad teachers, but they freeze when confronted with the textbook.

Maybe it's because they've been told everything's different now and for some reason they buy it. But when looking at a problem, why would you leave anything off of the table. And yet, that is what happens.

-- SusanS - 22 Jun 2006

"Which Everyday-Math school would you like to enroll in, again?"

Around here, it's either supplemented or it isn't. Schools that supplement usually do so to keep parents happy.

Also, which Ed School teachers do you want, the whole language ones, or the balanced literacy ones?

Which curriculum do you want, the really, really, slow one, or the slow one?

-- SteveH - 23 Jun 2006

"I've noticed that it is important to your child to have your method be consistent with the method being taught by their teacher."

Actually, it's better to have the method taught by the school be consistent with the method you teach at home. Best of all, if the school does their job, then you don't have to do it for them.

-- SteveH - 23 Jun 2006

"Many (perhaps most) of the problems we are having in education result in large part from the customer not being the consumer."

AMEN!!

-- KarenA - 23 Jun 2006