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In a December 19, 2008 letter to the editor of the Frederick News Post, Steve Wilson, a math professor from Johns Hopkins University, issues a warning "not to the newspaper or to the board or the teachers, but to the parents. If your child goes to a school that uses TERC Investigations, you should understand that it means your child's school has abdicated its responsibility to teach your child mathematics. By doing so, the responsibility now rests with the parents. Good luck."
Such a letter has long been overdue. Hats off to Dr. Wilson.
Update: Independent of his letter to Frederick News Post, Dr. Wilson has been invited to be on a panel with other mathematicians and scientists to talk at Sidwell Friends School in mid January. The topic is on the mathematical skills, background and preparation necessary for success in mathematics and related mathematics fields in college. For those who don't know, Sidwell uses Investigations as well as Everyday Math. Most everyone knows, I think, that the Obama kids will attend Sidwell. And if you haven't seen it, I wrote about this here. And yes, Dr. Wilson intends to talk about Investigations during the panel discussion. Wish I could go but I think it's open only to parents of students who attend Sidwell.
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9 comments:
Here is my response to this post, with links to more resources from Professor Wilson.
An aspect of Investigations that I've never seen debated is it's delivery mechanism. Irrespective of the mathematical content and pedagogy, it's worth a look.
For a publisher it's a sweet concept. Each student gets a tear out style book (about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 inches thick) that is consumed through the course of the year. Think about the $$$ implications. Districts that pick this program are committed to buying these consumables year after year, forever. They also sell a 'text book'. Districts that are strapped for cash just buy a classroom's worth (30 or so). Districts that are flush with cash buy one per student (15 or so per class).
The textbooks are really pretty but in my experience they are just room decorations. The lexical content is above grade level and if you attempt to use it in conjunction with your tear out worksheets you drive your kids from the room screaming. Here's why.
Each day they are served up with consumables that jump around the hierarchy of mathematics. The text doesn't jump around, duh? So to use the text you have to enter it all over the place. It's sort of like using a dictionary. You only dive in when you need to so you might be on page 63 today and page 126 tomorrow. Or worse, today's topic can be found on pages 63,45, and 123 in your text.
There is no better way to convince kids that math is a disconnected jumble that does not make sense, than to use these books. Of course if you don't use them, the worksheets accomplish the same thing with more subtlety.
The power of this system (for the publisher) is that it presents itself really well to folks who choose the program. Nice tightly scripted worksheets and a book with very nice full color pictures, graphics, and all the bells and whistles, for the kids who can't get the math from the teacher.
In practice, it's a nightmare for the teacher who has to tear out a few hundred work sheets every single day (you just don't leave this to little hands). If there are kids who aren't on a pace with their peers (a given) there's not nearly enough to do on the worksheets and no other materials for independent work. Fast kids blow through the sheets in short order while slower ones can't do the work.
When kids bring homework home it is in the form of a worksheet and nothing else to help or guide them (or their parents).
IF (and I'm writing it as big as I can) the content was perfect, the delivery would ruin it. The program is a perfect triumph of emotion over reason.
Paul B:
What you described about Investigations applies to Everyday Math as well, and that HAS been debated, quite vigorously and frequently. Probably the reason why it hasn't come up with respect to Investigations is because the content, such as it is, is so bad. By comparison, Everyday Math is better, but of course that isn't saying much. To that end, though, some of the problems and approaches in EM really are NOT that bad--the problem is that what one does not see when looking at a worksheet, is that the sequence doesn't achieve the mastery needed to do the problems. As in Investigations, an EM worksheet does not give a clue as to what was done in class and thus provides no guidance. The teacher's manual (which I've read) does have some good instructional moments. The problem is that without a textbook, neither the parent nor the student can reconstruct what was done in class.
Barry, so right. I see the same weakness in CMP, nothing to bring home. In fact, in my district, kids can go from K-8 and never see a proper problem solution in a text. If they get lucky, they'll see some of this from teachers who lay it out for them but they won't see it in their texts.
My kids have no clue as to how to present a proper solution for all but the simplest computations. Their work often has the appearance of a thought explosion. It cripples them in multi-part problems because they can't 'say' it in a way that is useful to them.
They're like aspiring writers without sentences.
Barry,
Thanks for the great post!
I hope that this gets the attention of many parents and that mathematicians have an opportunity (again and again) to explain the ill-effects of these math programs.
ALL PARENTS want their children to have the OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN CONTENT needed for further study. Districts must stop closing doors to children by using these mediocre programs.
Thank you Professor Wilson!!
I need to get the entire letter posted, in full.
For a mathematician to issue a warning to parents, rather than a protest or argument aimed at educators & policymakers, is quite radical.
Parents have essentially no standing in these debates (apart from proponents of vouchers). We have our own little neck of the woods, where we talk to each other & figure out how to teach or reteach our kids. But when the bigshots are making recommendations, they generally have nothing to say to parents -- and they feel free to take gratuitous swipes at parents when they need to bond with each other by triangulating against a third party. Parents are the third party it's OK to offend.
Although mathematicians are rolled over by math educators, a mathematician is presumed to have far higher status than a parent.
For a mathematician to bypass math educators to speak directly to parents: not supposed to happen.
I've taken to saying, lately, that the education wars feature, on one side, parents and professors in the liberal arts disciplines...and, on the other, ed schools and unions.
That happens to be true, and when you put it so starkly I think it makes it easy to see that parents' judgment has historically been superior to that of (most) education professors.
I'm told my district spent $1.5 million on Trailblazers.
That would have paid for resurfacing a field.
Paul - does TERC talk about "differentiated instruction" at all??
Or "offer opportunities" for differentiated instruction?
Hi Catherine:
Investigations incorporates differentiation strategies in the teacher's guides. These are the standard differentiation techniques used in all programs. To my knowledge there are no specially provided materials to support the program. It might be that my district just chose not to purchase them and that's why I never saw such things.
The worksheets that kids get are pretty much differentiation light anyway, i.e. the nature of the worksheets is; tightly scripted, templated work, dispensed in small chunks. You might say the entire program is differentiated.
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