Everyday Math introduces new web site for parents

For fans of Everyday Math, you may be interested in the new website for parents that the Wright Group just put up. It's located here and it even has a handy link to NCTM in case you want to enhance the experience.

They've thought of everything including a PowerPoint presentation for parents.

If you download it, please view it in "notes" view because they have extensive commentary in the notes section that is worth the price of admission. For example, on the first slide they come up with some interesting factoids such as "40% of adults hated math in school" and "84% of middle schoolers would rather do “anything” other than math homework". For those of us who may be critical thinkers and actually question such statements and where they were derived, the Wright Group is thinking of YOU. If you look at the "notes" page for this slide you will see that they give references and even explain what they mean:

Some of us love math. Many of us just hate it. According to an AP-AOL News poll of 1,000 adults, almost four in 10 of those surveyed said they hated math in school. That's twice as many as felt that strongly about any other school subject. And the dislike of math often trickles down to our children. A survey by Raytheon Co. found the vast majority of middle-school students would rather eat their vegetables, take out the garbage, clean their rooms or go to the dentist than study math. In fact, about 84 percent of students between the ages of 11 and 13 said they would rather do ``anything'' other than math homework, the survey showed. But, students CAN learn to love and appreciate math! To achieve this, the University of Chicago discovered that you have to teach math in a different way from they way most of us were taught.

My gosh, you just can't refute verifiable data like that! I wonder what the stats would look like in other nations. Well, of course, we can't count other nations because of cultural differences and norms and stuff like that. Plus foreigners are way different than us. 84% of students between 11 and 13 would rather do anything than math homework. How about history homework, or English? Or going to school in general? And of course the survey probably excluded those students in schools using EM; these people are not sloppy in their research. Well, why bother with these picky details when the conclusion is so obvious! Math has to be taught differently than from how WE were taught. And we all know how we were taught. With direct instruction, desks in a row, teacher in the front, and we actually had textbooks and those textbooks actually had real math in it. And everyone unanimously agrees that this approach simply does NOT work. Never mind about Project Follow Through. Alan Schoenfield quite effectively addressed that in his paper "The Math Wars":

"Carnine advocates direct instruction, and he is an author of two direct instruction programs currently being marketed in California: DISTAR and Connecting Math Concepts, produced by Science Research Associates (SRA)/McGraw-Hill. Thus, Carnine stood to profit financially from a state board endorsement of direct instruction. That would appear to be a conflict of interest, but the state board proceeded in any case—with Carnine being the sole purveyor of research on effective instruction to the board. Not to put too fine a point on it, the report was shoddy at best. The methodology was questionable, so much so that the American Educational Research Association’s Special Interest Group for Research in Mathematics Education, a collection of specialists in the area, wrote a public letter to the state board disputing Carnine’s methods. Summaries of many of the papers reviewed were inaccurate, and some of the report’s conclusions were not clearly related to the research summary. Nonetheless, Carnine’s report went on to serve as the basis for the section on instructional strategies in the board-approved 1999 Frameworks."

The 1999 Frameworks are part of California's standards for math. And of course we all know how bad they are. I'm so grateful to Shoenfeld for clarifying Carnine's conflict of interest. He doesn't mention all the other people on the project, I notice. Not to mention that Everyday Math's research base has lots of stuff by William Carrol who's on U of Chicago's payroll and I think there's some stuff by Andy Isaacs too. But that's different. Those guys know what they're talking about.

Let's go on in the fabulous PowerPoint. The next slide "Everyday Mathematics in the classroom" also has some interesting notes in the "notes" view:

"The researchers [oh, that would be William Carrol and Andy Isaacs I betcha. Maybe Fenema too. No Kamii, though. These guys are picky!] found that children learn math best through hands-on activities that build on their interests and connect to their experiences. Young children can grasp math concepts traditionally saved for older students (for example, algebra) when concepts are explored with concrete materials and pictures. All this is so important because these children will live in a world where careers require the ability to access, evaluate, and use information to solve problems. Rote memorization and basic arithmetic computation) are not enough. "

I'm glad they said what they did about rote memorization and basic computation not being enough. We all know that that's what ALL textbooks ever did. There were never any explanations about how things worked, no explanations about place value, no explanations about how the algorithm for two digit multiplication worked. And of course, Everyday Math doesn't require any memorization. Except for the lattice method. And the trade first method. And partial products. And partial quotients. But that's different. Those alternatives allow the students to see how everything works. Just ask a student in a class that uses EM to explain how these algorithms work. You'll really be surprised!

Well, you can explore the rest on your own. And I'm sure you'll now give the school administrators and Boards of Education the kudos they deserve for exercising their finely honed critical thinking skills in making their purchasing decisions.