back in the game

Hi G --

I learned last week that at least 2 students in the 8th grade Math A class are being tutored by district math teachers. One of the kids in the class told me, "It's sort of like insider trading."

Given the department’s refusal to share curricular materials with parents, I have to agree. When an Irvington parent hires an Irvington math teacher to tutor an Irvington student, that teacher/tutor has access to:

• class syllabus
• course scope and sequence
• teacher’s edition of the textbook
• answer key
• solution manual
• supplemental Glencoe practice workbooks and answer keys aligned to Glencoe Algebra textbook
• attendance at department meetings; access to informal conversations amongst colleagues, etc.
• knowledge of material to be covered on upcoming quizzes and tests
  

The other students and their parents have none of these things. I’ve asked; other parents have asked. The department’s answer has been “No.”

As a result, I’ve been forced to work every homework set assigned this year myself. I finished Homework #73 during the Super Bowl. [update: finished HW #81 tonight]

I’ve had to do this because Irvington teachers do not collect or correct math homework. That might not matter if Irvington math teachers performed frequent formative assessments. But they don’t do that, either.

Instead, homework problems are “gone over” in class and more homework is assigned. If a student “doesn’t understand” a problem covered in class, the onus falls upon him or her to “seek extra help.”

No student is asked to re-do a problem he’s missed.

This system does not work for C. I doubt it works for most students his age, and certainly not for students coming into Math A with so many gaps in their prior knowledge of arithmetic.

To learn math, C. needs to have his homework corrected; then he needs to re-do the problems he’s missed. Simply listening in class as Mr. X “goes over” the homework isn’t enough. Because Mr. X is a good lecturer C., thinks he’s understood Mr. X’s explanation, and I’m sure he has. But “understanding” and “doing” are two different things, and students are tested on the latter not the former. C, has no idea he can’t do a problem until his parent checks to see whether he can — or until he gets it wrong on a test.

“Extra Help,” the district’s stock answer to teaching and learning problems, doesn’t work, either.

It doesn’t work because C., doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Not knowing what you don’t know is typical of all human beings, not just middle school students. Not knowing what you don’t know is so commonplace that Richard Elmore identifies the belief that “students learn by asking teachers questions about things they don’t understand” as one of 5 “common errors of classroom practice.”

(I’ve attached the slides from Elmore’s presentation to the Tri State Consortium.)

For all of these reasons, I am renewing my request for the materials listed above. I would very much appreciate the district providing me with the class syllabus, the scope and sequence, and all relevant answer keys and solution manuals including answer keys to the Glencoe supplementary materials I’ve been able to locate online as Ms. P. advised me to do in our meeting of 12-13-2006.

In that meeting Ms. P. told Ed and me that, “If students need distributed practice, parents can find worksheets online.” I have indeed found Glencoe’s supplementary materials online but the answer keys are not posted.

I hope that I, along with other interested parents, can be provided these materials as soon as possible. If the district is going to outsource core teaching functions to parents, we should have access to the materials we need to perform these functions as best we can.

As a side note, I’ve consulted with the Committee on Open Government on this question. Answer keys fall under Freedom of Information Law.

Thanks very much.

Catherine Johnson



It's been awhile since I've emailed the powers that be.