[Everyday Math, I gather, is still very much in use, and so I thought it worthwhile to recycle this old post.]
Twice this past week I saw shocking examples of the cumulative
effects of Everyday Math. Last Thursday I visited a nearby private school with
sliding scale tuition and a diversity of students. For years the school had
used Everyday Math, but recently, with the encouragement of a friend and
colleague of mine who advises schools on math curricula, they’d begun to use
Singapore Math. They’re phasing it in gradually, however, and currently don’t
introduce it until 4th grade. For the first few grades, like nearly every other
school in Philadelphia, they use Everyday Math.
So the 4th graders I observed had only been using Singapore Math since
September. Their teacher was walking them through a topic in the 3rd grade
Singapore Math curriculum: how to multiply and reduce fractions. And no one in
the class who tried to answer the teacher’s questions got a single answer
right. They didn’t know how to find ¼ of a 20, and they didn’t know how to
reduce 5/20.
The next day I spent my first session of the school year with a group of
children of French African immigrant parents who had enrolled them in an after
school enrichment program I’m involved with. They were four Everyday
Math-educated 5th graders, and I was exploring their mastery of addition and
subtraction. Addition went fine: they know how to stack numbers and carry from
one digit to the next. Subtraction was another story.
Heartened by their success adding two three-digit numbers, I asked them how to
do 1000 - 91. All but one of the five students were stumped. Most got the same
number: 1011. Two things had stumped them: 0 - 1, which they thought was 1, and
how to borrow across more than one digit. So I gave them an easier problem,
100-71--and they were equally stumped, again getting answers that were larger
than the number they were subtracting from. So I began the tricky process of
teaching them how to borrow across more than one digit.
The great thing is that they were hooked. When I asked them whether their
answers should be bigger or smaller than the number they were subtracting from,
they all answered “smaller.” When I then asked them whether their answers were,
in fact, smaller, they looked down at their sheets, and then up at me, and I
had their undivided attention. These are good kids: they want to learn. And
they like math.
You can’t blame the mathematical deficiencies of these 4th and 5th graders on
their parents: both the private school and the after school program select for
parents who care about education. You can’t blame it on the kids: my kids, who
clearly wanted to learn, and had been admitted in part based on their behavior;
in the private school classroom I saw, they were very well behaved. You can’t
blame it on class size: the classes I observed contained between 7 and 12
students. You can’t blame it on the teachers: the teachers I saw seemed well
above average in their ability to engage their students in the material at
hand.
No, I’m afraid there’s only one thing we can blame here, much as the developers
of the Everyday Math monolith would like to claim otherwise.
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