25 Jul 2005 - 23:01

working with teachers & principals

I make no bones that parents whose children are struggling with a poor mathematics curriculum should find a good curriculum and teach that one instead.

But that raises the issue of what happens politically and socially when a parent rejects a school's math curriculum.

Good question.

it doesn't have to be a battle

My own experience this year was terrific.

Of course, I wasn’t rejecting a curriculum the school had embraced; I was rejecting a curriculum the school had rejected (SRA Math, which is being replaced by Trailblazers).

Even so, I was using a different curriculum at home, and everyone knew it. The reason they knew it was that I printed out copies of the Table of Contents for Christopher to take in and show his teacher.

She was great. She admired all the lesson headings, and told Christopher, “All the parents should be doing this.” It was incredibly sweet of her.

At one point I sent an email saying I was having trouble getting Christopher to cooperate (that’s an understatement) and asking if she could tell him he needed to do my homework, too.

She did.





When we told her, in January, that our goal was to move him to Phase 4, the accelerated track, she blanched. There were already a number of kids in Phase 4 who were struggling; the class was oversubscribed. One child had just been moved ‘down’ to Phase 3, and it had been upsetting to all concerned.

She’d never thought of Christopher as ‘a Phase 4 kid,’ she said. She didn’t want to see him try Phase 4 and fail. (Neither did we.)

It took her about 2 minutes to decide she probably could think of Christopher as a Phase 4 kid, and the reason she could think of him as a Phase 4 kid was that ‘you’ll give him the support he needs.’ She saw clearly that Christopher’s dad and I would do whatever we needed to do to help him succeed—and she saw that we would be taking responsibility for the move. If it didn’t work out, we weren’t going to be back in the school yelling at people. (True.)

Once she'd turned her point of view around 180 degrees, she told us that if we were going to move him we needed to do it now. Suddenly it was our turn to blanch; my plan was to move him in the fall, after we'd had another summer to work on his math.

She said, in so many words, that my plan was going to be problematic. For years the middle school has been hammering the elementary school about placing too many kids in the accelerated class, giving inflated grades, etc., etc., or so I gather. ('Hammering' is not the word she used or implied.) The middle school had made crystal clear to teachers & to parents that they would be placing fewer kids in Phase 4 come fall, not more. Which meant they probably weren't going to think Christopher, who'd been in Phase 3 from day one, and who'd done badly in 4th grade math, was an obvious candidate for the accelerated track.

As she put it, 'They aren't going to know him the way we do.' If we wanted to do it, she said, we needed to do it now.

We said, OK, then, we'll do it now.

She got Christopher moved to Phase 4 within the week.

Not only did she support us in doing something she didn’t necessarily think was a good idea, she told us how to work the ropes. Then she worked the ropes for us.

using TIMSS

Christopher's second math teacher, in Phase 4, was just as terrific. She once sent home a formal, hand-written explanation of the compound interest problems in SRA Math. Yes, it’s mortifying to reveal that I needed a hand-written explanation of compound interest, but there you have it. It was a darn good explanation, too. Later on I learned she’d been an accountant for 15 years before changing careers.

The TIMSS data on U.S. students is a big part of the ‘secret’ to working well with your school district when you object to the math curriculum. The first time I mentioned to our principal, Don, that I thought Christopher maybe ought to move to the accelerated track, he got that tight not-now-not-ever look on his face administrators always get when parents start bugging them to do things they don’t think they ought to do.

I backed off, because in fact Christopher wasn’t ready to move to the accelerated track. But I publicly raised the issue of why the accelerated kids were using a book that was a full year ahead of the rest of the kids without any of us parents having been told.

Naturally it turned out Don hadn’t been told, either; he’s an interim principal. He looked into it, and was obviously pretty dismayed at what he found (not worth going into here).

When we sat down and talked about it, I took the tack that I didn’t think Christopher is Secretly Gifted And Talented In Math; I just wanted him to be on the same track kids are on in high-achieving countries. Which is true. Here are the Magic Words to use with principals, teachers, administrators, & school boards:


In high-achieving countries, students take and master algebra in the 8th grade.


Here in America, only the accelerated kids take and master algebra in the 8th grade.

I told Don: if kids in Germany pass Algebra 1 in 8th grade, I want Christopher to pass Algebra 1 in 8th grade, too.

He had exactly zero problems with that, and the minute Christopher was ready to move to the faster class, he moved him up.

The fact is, our problems in math ed are national, not local, and everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it, but nobody knows how to fix it. Ideological constructivists think they know how to fix it, but your basic principal and/or teacher is living in the real world, facing real children and real parents who blame them when math scores are bad. They’re on the firing line. I don’t think too many principals & teachers truly believe ‘reform math’ is going to be the miracle we’ve been looking for for the last 100 years.

So basically, his feeling was: I’d like to see all our kids learning at the same rate as kids in Singapore. So would I. I don't blame him for our school having the same problems every other school has.

giving respect where respect is due

Once I started teaching Christopher my own hand-picked curriculum, I was on the firing line. For awhile there I was actually having him do the homework I assigned instead of the homework he brought home from school…..so exactly whose fault was it going to be if he didn’t succeed?

It was going to be my fault.

Everyone sensed this. I had moved out of the potentially ticked-off parent category and into the junior colleague category.

That’s another thing.

I also developed a healthy new respect for the teachers he’d had thus far. I couldn’t teach Topic One out of SRA Math, but all of them had managed to teach him a huge amount of math from SRA, which he had retained. His math knowledge from 2nd and 3rd grades was solid as a rock.

So I stopped being a critic, and became a teacher. That meant I asked the school’s teachers for help & advice, and made clear I respected their seniority. Christopher felt the same way. When he told me, ‘Mrs. Panitz is a better teacher than you,’ I sent her an email letting her know.

bullet points

For me, in this school district, putting together public school & home teaching worked during the one year I've done it. Would my approach work everywhere? Most places? I don't know. What I do know is that your basic teacher went into the profession because he or she wanted kids to succeed. Teachers are rooting for the kids, not against them. If you're helping your child succeed, their inclination is going to be to root for you, too.

My (tentative) advice thus far:

• tell your teachers what you’re doing, within limits. I didn’t announce the fact that I was substituting my homework for the school's, and I don’t think I should have done so. It would have been nervewracking for Christopher's teacher—it was nervewracking for me—and since I was going to do it anyway, why get her worried?

• respect the teacher's experience and authority. Show respect even if you're a math major working in a mathematics-related career. Your math knowledge greatly exceeds the teacher's, but your pedagogical content knowledge almost certainly does not.

• ask for help (but don’t suck up lots of the teacher's time)

• tell your child his teachers are good, it's the curriculum, or the too-slow American track, that's the problem

• whenever you talk to teachers or principals, keep the focus on international standings, not local failings

keywords: afterschooling politics of math math wars conflicts with teachers conflicts with schools

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I was a simple kid in a Florida school and mastering Algebra I was a normal phase in a college bound student's life...

-- KtmGuest - 12 Dec 2005

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hi ktm guest!

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

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did you take algebra 1 in 9th or in 8th?

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

WebLogForm
Title:	working with teachers & principals
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	ParentsTeachingKids, SingaporeMath
LogDate:	200507251812