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Vicky S. seems to have the same problem I have.
Everyday Math can't be done.
Part 1 - Student Math Journal - two volumes, 12 units, 441 pages.
This seems to be the workbook they do in class. (Only rarely have I seen it come home.) From what my son says, the teacher gives them a little bit of introduction and then they work on it individually in class. This is a big waste of class time. They look like ordinary math worksheets, but with the usual EM spin. Some good and some strange, like "What is the One?" No group discovery here.
I need to find Volume 1 to see how many pages weren't done, but for Volume 2, out of 230 pages, I have 176 pages not done! They must have completed a higher percentage in Volume 1.
How can you cover 441 pages in class when the students are spending most of the time working by themselves really, really slowly? Even with direct instruction for the whole class time, the teacher would have to move right along. The problem is that the Math Journal is not a textbook. It's a workbook with a little bit of explanation. This is more like homework. The kids are wasting precious class time doing what should be homework. They do it very slowly, so you can't go fast enough to cover all of the material.
Part 2 - Study Links - one volume, 12 units, 275 pages.
This is what the students do at home for homework. The pages are torn out and put in the child's folder. Almost all of these pages are one-sided, even though the blank back side is numbered. There are 275 pages, but only 126 assignments. Almost all assignments have less than 10 questions for the kids to answer; many only 3 or 4. Math homework NEVER took very long. There is no mastery here. My son has 55 of these assignments not assigned, mostly from units 8 - 12. He was given (126 - 55) 71 EM homework assignments. The teacher gave some of her own to remediate skills that should have been learned in earlier grades, but he did not have math homework every night. They need to have a textbook that the teacher can teach from, and they need a workbook that they use for homework. (I really don't know why they can't just have one reusable textbook like the old days. I guess this makes more money for the book companies.) They need to have the kids do worksheets (mostly) at home and not at school. The teacher should be controlling the pace in class and have all of the students follow the examples on the board.
Does anyone have a teacher's guide? What do they tell the teachers to do? Do they have suggestions about how a class period should work? Do they say anything about how to cover all of the material? With 441 pages to cover in class, that's about 2 1/2 pages per class hour. Let me pick out some pages at random:
Student Math Journal, volume 2, pages 270 and 271 (by the way, these weren't done in my son's class.)
Page 270 - An Area Model for Fraction Multiplication. Eight rectangles and problems like 2/3 * 3/4.
Page 271 - An Algorithm for Fraction Multiplication. Two short answer and 8 problems to do.
Two pages. Not too bad, but it's in workbook form as if they expect the kids to do the work in class, and that's what they do. If the teacher is using direct instruction, he/she could control the pace and do the problems on the board. The teacher could ask questions or have students come to the board and do it there. According to my son, the teacher gives them a brief intro, and then they are on their own. It must be great to have a pedagogy that requires less work. Student! Discover it thyself!
For Singapore Math, you have the 5A and 5B "textbooks" that look more like real textbooks and not worksheets. There is something for the teacher to do. There are 192 pages in the textbooks and 206 pages in the workbooks. For a 180 day school year, that's a little over one page a day; very reasonable. The textbooks have some practice problems, but I would do a few in class and assign the rest (or a few) as homework, along with the workbook.
On top of having too many pages to cover, Everyday Math students are still behind Singapore Math students.
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5 comments:
How can you cover 441 pages in class when the students are spending most of the time working by themselves really, really slowly?
Hey!
I know this one!
It's a NONROUTINE PROBLEM!
The only way to do it is to devote hours of time to EM math.
Some teachers call EM "All Day Math" because that's the only way to get through it.
And even if they finish both journals, most kids will not have mastered the basics of fractions, decimals, and percent in 5th grade.
But reading a table and graph? That they have covered.
"Some teachers call EM "All Day Math" because that's the only way to get through it."
Have you heard anything about what teachers do? My son's teacher knew about this too, but didn't feel the need to plan ahead. She just went along and stopped when the school year stopped.
I guess it never dawned on me that nobody expects to finish Everyday Math. It's not even close. That's why I would like to see what the publishers show as a typical or expected time-table for the curriculum.
Our Everyday Math experience was very different in the public & private schools.
In public school, there is extensive training (since it is a citywide curriculum--50 elementary schools). One of the main training goals is to get the teachers through the whole curriculum each year. Teachers who want to teach to mastery invariably slow down and can't finish--so they are told they need to change their way of thinking.
Another thing the teachers short-changed in order to get through the curriculum was the games. They did not understand that the games were an integral part of the curriculum for the acquisition of computational fluency. Sometimes they would ask the parents to do the games with the kids at home.
In public school my kids did the journals (SMJ), both in class and at home. The study links were done in a 5th grade class for homework--it was a ton of work. Did your child get to the Egyptian multiplication??
The kids can get through the EM curriculum each year IF there is no dilly dallying and IF there is enough classroom time (I think it needs at least an hour a day of class time). I even know of a sixth grade teacher who finished the books by about February and then taught the kids real math for the last 3 months in order to prepare them for jr high (she was awesome! but they had a heckuva lot of homework!). The district math police would probably not let her get away with this if they knew about it.
Private school is different. For example, in ours, EM is ONLY used in 5th grade. Go figure. The SMJ's were used, and we also had to buy the SRB (hardcover student reference book--these were not part of what we had in public school and there were only a couple for reference in the classroom). The Study Links were not used at all. I don't think there was any teacher training; somehow a couple years ago one of the math teachers decided to use EM and that was that, I guess. There is vocabulary in EM that I know well from all my prior contact with it and my research, but the 5th grade teachers don't know (e.g., "friendly numbers"). In private school, the teachers can pick and choose what to teach in EM. Trouble is, it's not a pick-and-choose curriculum (as you know). That's why it's nearly impossible to accelerate or pre-test. Everything is all mixed together in a big math stew. And being a private school, it's possible they don't even have a curriculum map that is used to coordinate subject matter from grade to grade. Do they use EM in 6th grade (not that you'll be there to see) but if not, then it doesn't really matter how far they get in 5th. It's just a lot more loosy goosy in a private school, I think.
As LynnG says, even if they finish both books most kids will not have mastered the basics of fractions, decimals, and percent in 5th grade. So at some level, who cares how far they get. You basically have to cover it all at home anyway.
Thanks for the feedback, Vicky.
No Egyptian multiplication or games (except a few) at my son's school, but they never got close to finishing. I think the teacher had her hands full trying to remediate problems. There are no guarantees of better or stronger academics at private schools. That's one of the reasons our son is going back to public school. If we have to do the work ourselves, we might as well save some money.
"Everything is all mixed together in a big math stew."
I like that. It's a stew, not a spiral.
Even if you finish Everyday Math, more is still less.
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