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On an occasional evening at the kitchen table in Brooklyn, N.Y., Victoria Morey has been known to sit down with her 9-year-old son and do something she's not supposed to."I am a rebel," confesses this mother of two. And just what is this subversive act in which Morey engages — with a child, yet?
Long division.
Yes, Morey teaches her son, who'll enter fifth grade in the fall, how to divide the old-fashioned way — you know, with descending columns of numbers, subtracting all the way down. It's a formula that works, and she finds it quick, reliable, even soothing. So, she says, does her son.
[snip]As the math coordinator for six public schools in Ridgefield, which over the last two years have implemented the Growing in Math curriculum, [Pat Cooney has] seen a lot of angry parents.
"I had one parent who was probably as angry as a parent could be," Cooney says. "I've had irate phone calls. Some think we're giving the kids misinformation. They think we're not doing our jobs."
One problem, Cooney says, is that parents remember math as offering only one way to solve a problem. [ed.: evidence, please] "We're saying that there's more than one way," Cooney says. "The outcome will be the same, but how we get there will be different." Thus, when a parent is asked to multiply 88 by 5, we'll do it with pen and paper, multiplying 8 by 5 and carrying over the 4, etc. But a child today might reason that 5 is half of 10, and 88 times 10 is 880, so 88 times 5 is half of that, 440 — poof, no pen, no paper.
"The traditional way is really a shortcut," Cooney says. [take the long way round...] "We want kids to be so confident with numbers that it becomes intuitive."
As for parents, Cooney hopes that if they're teaching kids at home, at least it won't be: "Let me show you how you REALLY do it," Cooney says. She's spending the rest of her summer working on plans for more family nights at school, to better explain the system.
Renegade Parents Teach Old Math on the Sly
They do what they do.
And we do what we do.
You may be able to leave a comment on the Education Week post of the article here.
how to get parent buy in
Everyday Math does it, too
a teacher using Math Trailblazers
parents rise up
math night coming right up
10 comments:
I find this article particularly amusing in light of a recent MSNBC article (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25419197/from/ET/) that claimed essentially the opposite--that is, that the reason why parents are clamoring for more math education at school is that they aren't comfortable teaching math at home. They then cite a Penn professor (the one who hand-picked our school's Investigations curriculum) as saying that the reason we parents don't want to teach math at home is that our own math education made us feel like math failures.
The article completely ignores the more likely alternative: that parents want more *real* math ed at school because they're tired of picking up the slack at home; that many of us don't feel like math failures, but are concerned that our children will be; that perhaps more of us are teaching more math at home than ever before.
It was during the week this article came out that a third fellow school parent approached me and asked how to get her hands on Singapore Math.
One of the things I most object to, at this point, is the constant psychologizing of parents.
Why we do what we do has no bearing on the situation. They're our kids; we're paying the salaries.
These are public schools, and we are the public.
You should leave a comment on the Ed Week article...
"But a child today might reason that 5 is half of 10, and 88 times 10 is 880, so 88 times 5 is half of that, 440 — poof, no pen, no paper."
Invariably, when constructivists get excited about fabulous other ways, the examples they give involve superfriendly numbers like half of ten.
the examples they give involve superfriendly numbers like half of ten
like clockwork, only more so
Plus, I would like to know how reasoning that 5 is half of 10 etc. is somehow not a shortcut.
I'm very much afraid that this woman (Cooney) has anything to do with any math cirriculum. The ``traditional'' method of multiplication is called the multiplication algorithm. It is a reliable method that takes advantage of the rich structure of the real numbers under addition. Her example is nothing more than a trick. Question: How many tricks do you need multiply two arbitrary numbers together? Answer: How many numbers are there? Question: How many algorithms do you need to multiply two arbitrary numbers together? Answer: One. The so-called new math does nothing but mystify mathematics by hiding its true structure. This keeps students ignorant. The sooner we get away from this garbage, the better.
Don't call it "New Math." My New Math book (Elementary Mathematics-Margaret Willerding) goes into detail explaining how the multiplication algorithm works.
ari-free
Must get these comments up front!
The AP story on “renegade” parents has this line:
“They call it the Math Wars: The debate, at times acrimonious, over which way is best to teach kids math.”
I am not sure it is correct to say that the conflict is “over which way is best to teach kids math.” That assumes there is agreement on outcomes regarding skills and content knowledge between the camps. That’s not at all the case. Constructivists don’t value computational fluency and procedural knowledge. The trend as I see it is to take nasty numbers out of math as much as possible and to turn math into language arts and visuals. For example, state tests have very little on fractions. A topic like long division is neglected. Pseudo-statistics is promoted (mean, median, mode forever).
David Klein made observations along those lines:
It would be a mistake to think of the major conflicts in education as disagreements over the most effective ways to teach. Broadly speaking, the education wars of the past century are best understood as a protracted struggle between content and pedagogy. At first glance, such a dichotomy seems unthinkable. There should no more be conflict between content and pedagogy than between one's right foot and left foot. They should work in tandem toward the same end, and avoid tripping each other. Content is the answer to the question of what to teach, while pedagogy answers the question of how to teach.
The trouble comes with the first step. Do we lead with the right foot or the left? If content decisions come first, then the choices of pedagogy may be limited. A choice of concentrated content precludes too much student centered, discovery learning, because that particular pedagogy requires more time than stiff content requirements would allow. In the same way, the choice of a pedagogy can naturally limit the amount of content that can be presented to students. Therein lies the source of the conflict.
If they lead with their pedagogy foot, they will be walking in a different direction. That's why the National Math Panel had to define "school math".
Schools also lower their expectations. It's not just how to teach and which direction to go. Many parents in our town might not know much about constructivism, but they know low expectations when they see them. They send their kids somewhere else. Now there is less demand for higher expectations in our schools.
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