This post has a little something for everyone - a homeschool tie-in, a local tie-in, and a national tie-in, so I am posting it on She’s Right (my political blog) and Crafty Mama’s Homeschool (my homeschooling/crafting blog).
Yesterday, I was reading one of my favorite homeschool blogs, Why Homeschool, and they had a link to an interview with Oak Norton, a father of five from Utah, who is fighting to get good, old fashioned math back in the schools there.
He now publishes a single-frame comic on the website Weapons of Math Destruction.
A little background, from Norton, about the problem (from the edspresso interview):
A few years ago my oldest daughter was finishing up her third grade year and at a parent/teacher conference I asked her teacher when they were going to start learning the times tables since they hadn’t yet and I’d done it nearly thirty years earlier in third grade.
The teacher replied, “Oh, we don’t do that anymore.” [pause for picking my jaw off the ground]
“You don’t do that anymore?”
“That’s right, it’s not part of the curriculum.”
“Well then how do you expect the children to learn their times tables?”
“Well,” she thoughtfully paused, “the smart kids will just pick it up as they go.” This time my jaw cracked hard when it hit the ground and I was off to the principal’s office.
The principal explained that although this method was different from how we had grown up, there were problems with traditional math and all the research showed kids were really excelling under these discovery learning methods. I left with a serious intestinal problem and promptly purchased Singapore math workbooks and flashcards for my children to make sure they knew their basic facts.
I was reading through the WMD archive, I noticed a familiar curriculum: MathLand. Wait. That’s what they use in Burlington.
As it turns out, MathLand is one of the not-really-math math programs that is responsible for dumbing-down our kids here in America.
And they do use it in Burlington. In other words, they want us to approve a spending of almost $11,000 per pupil, but the kids will likely leave without a mastery of mathematics.
Thankfully, for me and my kids, the curriculum we use, Saxon, is one of the programs recommended by the WMD site. It focuses on - gasp! - rote memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts AND the correct answer matters!
Why does all this - My math is better. No my math is better - matter? It just so happens, I came across a You Tube video, called “Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth,” (Hat Tip: Chanman) where examples from two leading fuzzy math texts are given (you won’t believe how profoundly stupid this is) and the real world implications for our children’s future.
The video is 15 minutes long, but you really have to see it to believe it. It is worse than you thought.
It is no secret that the United States lags behind the rest of the world in Math and Science Education. Watch this and you’ll see why.
Both the woman on the You Tube video (which is a quality video - she’s a TV weather woman) and Oak Norton recommend picking up Singapore Math to supplement your children at home.
On a side note: Did you know there is a name for that? Afterschooling. You know American Education is in trouble when supplementing your child’s education is so prevalent that there is a name for it.
7:25 am on January 24th, 2007
Hey, we use Singapore math.
But you know what? When I ordered my next set I was a bit dismayed. They appear to be introducing a new program and I am concerned that means they shall be phasing out what we are using. I contemplated purchasing all I need through sixth grade, just to be sure.
It sounded to me like the new books following the new curriculum mandated by the state included more opportunities for exploration and discovery and seemed based on American ideas.
But Singapore has a problem…they keep scoring on top of the world in their math and science scores, but in the real world of applied math through technology and such, they still lag far behind the US. Test scores aren’t everything : )
1:05 pm on January 24th, 2007
You raise a good point, Dana. It is very important that children also learn how to apply math and how to use technology, but some of these math programs do not require kids to memorize their basic facts (+,-,x,/) and they do not even teach how to do double-digit multiplication and long division the standard way. They learn to “reason” through it, by breaking it into smaller problems. (This is demonstrated in the video).
That is a valuable skill, but not instead of the standard method.
I strongly feel that kids will not become successful and confident in math without those skills. On the flip side, when my mother went back to college as an adult, she was very unconfident in her math ability and was scared to take college-level math, but her mastery of basic arithmetic was very solid. She ended up getting it very easily and aced the class.
Once you have the basics, you can learn anything.
I agree with you about test scores, too.
Thanks for your comment.
8:35 pm on January 25th, 2007
Oh, I am so glad that I homeschool.
I put a link to your blog on my blog!
5:47 am on April 21st, 2007
Thanks for talking about this subject. My kids are in public school, and because of these programs, I’ve been afterschooling three of them for thirteen months now.
I keep an extensive blog of our progress so that others may benefit.
We’ve used Singapore until this week, and now we’ve switched to Saxon.
I like afterschooling, as it gives me a taste of home schooling.
But I’m also in the campaign to get these fuzzy math curricula out of my town (Ridgewood, New Jersey)
Linda Moran