My Math is aligned to the CCSS and provides Differentiated Instruction through My Learning Station and Real-World Problem-Solving Readers. I will submit the request for a live webinar with a specialist as soon as I hear back from you.
Sounds ominous, but I haven't gone to look through yet.
I have looked through Jumpmath and would love to use it -- however, they don't have US versions of Grades 1-3 yet, only 4-7 (and our area is K-4). I could deal with explaining to kids about color vs. colour and meter vs. meter, but I'm not sure other teachers (or some parents) would be as, um, easy-going?!
Anyway, any knowledge that people have of My Math -- or of US schools using Jumpmath materials would be great.
And I do promise to do my own homework as well, but it will be the weekend before I have time to do a good job of looking through the curriculum. Unless there's so little of it there that we won't be able to tell about it anyway!
Thank you for any help the blog readers can give! --
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Sunday, February 16, 2014
Question from Jen
What do you all think of My Math from McGraw Hill?
I think MyMath is the worst of the bunch these days.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a scathing rant about it a couple years back, when a nearby school left Everyday Math and then chose it over Singapore Primary Math.
Here is what I told a parent at that school:
My Math is awful. really awful.
The good news is it doesn't spiral. But the order of the book matches a literal ordering of the Common Core standards. -- since the standards weren't written in a pedagogical order, this is unfortunate. (ed note:This may be fixed now..what I saw was the just-barely-CC aligned version. Could have been re-ordered since)
The bad news is the content is so incredibly weak.
e.g.
it takes them 7 lessons to teach the basics of decimals, and never once in those lessons do they explain why .8 = .80 (they gave a one line "Explanation" which is "as you can see from the picture above, adding zeroes to the right results in the same decimal."
They have no explanations for anything. and everything is dumbed down.
The differentiated instruction is awful. Their "enrichment" problems are so easy they wouldn't even qualify as normal problems in the normal Singapore math books. and even by 5th grade, the difficulty of problems seen in the books doesn't match 3rd grade Singapore math.
But! because it's in an almost sane order, it will be really easy to teach Singapore math at home and have your kid just ace math at school. There won't be any crazy lattice method for teaching multiplication, etc.
My Math reminds me of the old MathLand, but with much more educational gobbldygook. Their explanations don't deal with reality.
ReplyDelete"Following independent work, bring students back together in a large group and have them share any work product that was created at the learning station or tell what they did at the learning station."
That's right. Those students explain that they really didn't understand the material, but couldn't ask the teacher because he/she was busy. Then, the large group can talk about something that they either don't know about or aren't working on.
Once again, it's pedagogy that's trying to drive reality.
"Work product".
You can tell that it's junk just by the words they use.
Also, Common Core's top goal is to ensure that students will be successful in a college algebra course - i.e. no remediation. Differentiation has NOTHING to do with STEM preparation, if it even works.
Life will go on with the AP Calculus track in high school and educators will still not how parents and tutors helped those students at home. Common Core fails because it does not fix K-6 math.
It is indeed awful, I've looked at not a whole lot of it, but enough to say that it's not even close to good.
ReplyDeleteThanks!