Sean, via email;
Something isn’t adding up…
Small town doctor and parent Nhung Tran-Davies is leading a fight against ‘discovery math system’, a faddish new approach to teaching math that has become the basis of Alberta’s math curriculum. After discovering that the new teaching method had not only rendered her daughter Kenya unable to perform basic mathematical operations, but that she had also come to hate math as a result, Dr. Tran-Davies has taken a stand to restore common sense to Alberta’s math instruction by launching a petition to the province’s education minister, Jeff Johnson. Please take some time to read her story and to sign the petition if you too feel we need to revert to the old way of teaching math.
Article: http://goo.gl/7AIGHJ
Petition: https://www.change.org/petitions/back-to-basics-mastering-the-fundamentals-of-mathematics
Its my considered opinion that schools are not about kids or learning, they are make-work programs for unionized Leftist teachers. They are stealing your money and laughing at you. Fire them all.
Home school your kids. Even if all you do is let them read books and watch cartoons all day then do ten minutes of times tables at night, it will be better than what they get at school. If you really TEACH them things, they will be light years ahead of their friends at school.
Best part, they won’t have to un-learn seventeen years worth of Leftist entitlement and PC goodness when they finally try to get a job.
I agree. The one exception being one of my sons-in-law, as while he has to be part of the union, he is not a leftist by any stretch.
I am similarly unimpressed with the math curriculum. Originally I was concerned about the reading curriculum but the further you dig into the school system the more silliness you “discover”. Our school division does Mathletics online so the kids have an opportunity to learn basic math and compete with other children. The textbooks though are awful and,yes,the focus is on strategies to solve the problem more than repeatedly solving problems.
As a parent, you should do what the Alberta doctor has done – test your kids basic math skills but be prepare to be shocked. Then help your kids learn actual math. There’s lots of options – online, games dvds, or just plain old worksheets. Takes us about 10-15 mins per night.
IMO, the teaching curriculum has been ruined by leaving it to university academics who have little to no interaction with children or classrooms.
To EVERYONE with kids in the school system who are NOT doing well in math, I urge you, beg you, PLEAD with you to get your kids into the totally FREE internet-based math school called KHAN ACADEMY.
It’s funded by Bill & Melinda Gates, whose kids get their math education online at Khan Academy! …and you can see / hear / learn all about KHan Academy by watching the “60 Minutes” segment on it via the “60 Minutes” website or on You Tube.
EVERY young family with kids struggling in math that I have alerted to the Khan Academy has thanked me profusely for doing so after they see their kids quickly start to “get it” and improve their math grades as well as starting to LIKE math!
Khan Academy is global; it’s FREE; I am not associated / affiliated with Khan in any way. I’ve used Khan to greatly improve my “business math”; it teaches everything from 2 + 2 for toddlers all the way up to advanced calculus, using brief 10 ~ 12 minute videos followed by practise questions; you move / progress at your own pace. Check it out.
Dave Sanderson; Barrie, Ontario, Canada
My daughter is 2 1/2 years old and she is just starting to read. She knows her alphabet because I taught her the alphabet song a year ago. She knows numbers and can count to 20 or so. My wife and I teach her as we read to her. I fear that when she starts school that the learning will slow down or even stop. If I made more money I would put her in private school. This way the entitled leftist union scum would not be able to indoctrinate her with their ideological filth and make her into a future welfare scammer.
I found the kids get an ego boost from being the best or one of the best in their class in reading and math. It’s not because my kids are brilliant either, they’re just regular kids who have had the benefit of having supplemental education. Never underestimate the power of practice in sports or academics.
Parents should teach their children the basics of arithmetic in any event. Drill in the times tables is
always a good idea. A younger relative of mine who began her school arithmetic well ran into a
“slough of despond” when encountering one or another variety of freakazoid arithmetic teaching.
Her parents turned to me; we simply began drilling her. It can be made into a game, nothing heavy
about it. I would greet her in the mornings with something like “morning, C, what is three times five?”
Such drill is also good for motoring trips. She quickly regained her A or A+ marks, having fallen
to failing level.
The good old days? I learned arithmetic about 1953. Even then my mother and grandmother found
it a good idea to drill me in the times tables.
Of course there is no beating the British arithmetic teaching of pre-decimal pound days. We had such
delightful problems as, “given L 3 5 s 2 1/2 p compute interest at 5 1/2 %.” Oh yes; and “find the
square root of 22351.47”. I have lost my old school arithmetic but have a manual for teachers. To
keep them ahead of their pupils they were expected to do cube roots.
Sorry that Alberta school kids are falling victim to the Red Rat and her henchmen. They deserve better.
The recovery from this spring’s flood (if nothing else) shows what fine people the Albertans are. The Red
Rat has a lot of work to do before reducing them to red trash. I hope it never happens.
In the discovery math system, teachers aren’t supposed to teach and have children practise the best and most efficient ways to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Instead, teachers are to act as guides as students somehow discover and write out various strategies, such as estimating or rounding, to delve into math problems.
They’re teaching discovery English too, although it’s probably not called that.
I’m in my 40s and I can remember this sort of debate when I was a kid in Alberta, only it was about how to teach English, or “language arts” as we called it. The same sort of harumphing about how the old way was better. (I recall my grandfather banging on about how to teach phonetics – he was a farmer) Well, my English is just fine, thanks, and I always read above grade as a child, have two degrees etc..
Now my kids are in elementary school, and they take math, which is tough. In my opinion, young children are being taught math at levels far beyond what was being taught when I was their age, and the lessons are complemented by online programs D2L and IXL, so you can look at what your children are doing and how they are doing it. BTW, homework is now online, rather than in those annoying agendas that were pretty much wrecked by January. While the numbers do change from year to year, Alberta is still a world leader in math.
My advice: if your kid doesn’t like math, don’t blame the system. But I’m sure there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to learning, so if your child struggles in one area, then that’s where parenting comes in. But save your precious time trying to tell educators how you would do their job, even though you have no training, education or experience. Be grumpy at someone else.
Note my only experience as a child or parent has been in Calgary.
“We’ve been teaching math this way for centuries and students have gone to the moon and back, erected bridges, broken the speed of sound and created the internet. Let’s change the way we do things!”
As a retired teacher I can tell you that there were many of us who tried to stick with the tried and true methods of teaching math that we had seen work for many years even though we were being told to use “progressive” methods. Eventually we were brow beaten or spied on so much that you had to give in or like myself left the profession. Educational methodology tends to be circular so I’m confident that common sense will return again, someday, but in the meantime we risk destroying a generation. Extra work and drill at home has never hurt but it is now becoming imparative that parents at home drill the math basics to ensure that their children have these abilities.
Tara Houle is a parent in BC who is trying to get things changed here as well. See this excellent article by her:
http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/Math+made+simple/9414251/story.html
Her petition is here:
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/mastering-the-basics-of-mathematics-in-bc-schools.html
Please consider signing it if you live in BC and are worried about your child’s future.
I am really quite surprised to see a few comments in this thread that suggest nothing is wrong with math education. The Maths Makes Sense textbook that is used in BC is something frightening. I have a pretty extensive math background and I have never seen anything worse than that text. It should be burned. I know some math profs who will not even let their kids near the book, and have taken to teaching their children math.
When a 12 year old cannot even tell you what 9 times 8 is, there’s a problem.
The old system of teaching math didn’t work for me. Math is conceptual – once you grasp the concepts you get it and more practice doesn’t help. I caught on to long division right away but was still forced to stay in after school to do endless repetitions of it. It turned me off math for years even though it is my strongest aptitude. It wasn’t until I was in university and discovered statistics that I began to enjoy it again. It used to drive my fellow students crazy when they discovered that I didn’t study for stats exams. As I would tell them, once you get the concept, you get it, more studying doesn’t help.
But I agree that you still need to have the basics of addition and the multiplication tables drilled into you as they are the building blocks for the whole thing. Need to learn to walk before you can fly.
I would add that I think the problem with math education in schools today is indicative of a much bigger problem with education in general, namely that children are being used as experiments.
Those who are responsible for designing the education system don’t ask “What is best for these children so that they can succeed in a highly competitive world?” Instead they ask “What new experiment can I try on these children to burnish my own resume?” The approach to education is based on selfishness.
To make it worse, we are in this sort of downward spiral, where people who were poorly educated, are now running the education system, and are teaching in it.
I have seen *first hand*, high school science teachers who simply do not know science, and are teaching factually incorrect things to students. I have also seen some teachers – union mentality at work – who now refuse to do any marking, and have students mark all tests/assignments/etc.
Meanwhile, students get a full dose of First Nations appreciation, global warming indoctrination, social justice, and all the other nonsense.
I work with bright engineers from around the world, on a daily basis, and we are falling behind in Canada, believe me on this point.
And we are fighting this good fight in Ontario as well. If you’re reading this in Ontario please hit up mathrightontario.blogspot.ca and sign the petition that’s linked from there.
Yours truly did The Agenda with Steve Paikin on this issue last week. A reluctant TV appearance but that’s what you get for being a blogger I guess…
calgary dude said: “In my opinion, young children are being taught math at levels far beyond what was being taught when I was their age…”
Really? I was solving triangles with trig in grade 4 and 5. Sines, cosines, tangents is grade school stuff. These days kids don’t see trig until high school.
The problem is not with higher functions anyway. The problem is in grade 1-3 with learning basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and fractions. Kids who don’t know the times tables can’t do algebra, if you can’t do algebra you can’t do -anything-.
Many are the high school graduates who learn how to count back change on the job at Timmies instead of in school. This is not a good thing.
Exactly right Phantom.
As it so happens, I was lucky enough to find a dusty box in the house in which my father kept a bunch of school stuff from when I was about 6 to 10 years old. Included in the collection were some math tests and assignments, report cards from teachers, and so forth. There wasn’t too much there, but enough for me to get some sense of what I was learning in math at that point in my youth.
When I dug through it I was *shocked*, truly shocked, to see how much more I was taught in math then, compared to what my children learn today.
It was quite depressing to be honest.
At 8 years old my teacher wrote that I had “learned the times table up to 12. Congratulations!”
My son is 12, and if I ask him 8 times 9 he will stare at me like a deer in headlights. Needless to say, he and I are now working on his times tables, but what I am paying taxes for!!
Another problem in education, and it is all part of the same thing, is grade inflation.
Just dug up my old high school records. Luckily my report card back then had the class average, and your ranking. Some examples:
Music: My grade: 82, class average: 74, my ranking 1/23 (I liked music)
English: My grade: 80, class average: 64, my ranking 18/157
Physics: My grade: 78, class average: 66, my ranking 8/50
In my daughter’s science class, the class average is 94%, her grade is 96%! Ranking not provided. Compared to her I look like an idiot, yet I ended up getting a Ph.D. in engineering. Grades meant something back then.
Along with the poor math education, grades have become absolutely meaningless, and indeed there is now a push by leftists to do away with grades altogether. One more tool in the accountability toolkit removed.
My twins are in grade 8 and they do not have math textbooks at their middle school. We are drilling them at home to learn their multiplication tables and it’s a travesty how bad their math education is. After learning percentages and getting high marks on their tests, my twins still couldn’t figure out what 10% of 80 was. I wound up having to teach them how to do percentages myself. Drawing cartoons about math and writing about math should absolutely not be part of the math curriculum! The biggest outrage is the use of IPads in math class…sheesh!
Nhung Tran-Davies may soon expect the local RCMP SWAT team to be kicking in her door!
Alison Redfraud’s future plans for Alberta fundamentally depend entirely on young Albertan’s and the recent mass Third World biological emplacements to NOT understand math.
This could be the first of Alberta’s “dissapearences”.
Canadian Teacher Unions will in the end be the losers!
Despair not folks!
The KHAN ACADEMY on line is well worth checking out, Google will help find the treasure website, and bane of corrupt TEACHER UNIONS!
Yet another gift from the people that just keep on giving: the pooch screwing academic flat liners of the Alberta Teachers Association – the same fart suckers that gave us the rat faced Allison Redford for a premiere.
Parents, if you leave your kids to the mercies of these people you will get exactly what you deserve. It’s your kid that will pay for it though.
Right with you Robert L. Our kids are 4 and 6, and the older is in grade 1. He was reading in kindergarten (as his sister now is) and thinks that math is a game. With us at home he’s starting on multiplication, and I’m trying to teach him to play cribbage (for faster adding skills, and recognizing patterns for personal benefit). We try to keep track with what he’s learning at school, and I hope that the first time a teacher of his talks about how we’re destroying the planet he’ll give her an earfull.
One thing I won’t do is sacrifice him to improve the school around him. While I was growing up in a small town a number of concerned parents (including mine) were considering a job-lot send to a private school for about 10 or so of us, and they decided instead to work within the mainstream system to improve the general level. It partly worked – a couple of engineers, a professional artist (selling her wares, not depending on grants), and a few athletes who made a living at their sports. A lot of my former classmates are still welfare cases or stuck in the reservation trap. I think that those of us who prospered within/in spite of the mainstream system did so because of parental involvement. I had to un-learn a lot of the lessons I got from elementary and high school when it came time to work in the real world, but the challenges and opportunities presented by my parents was the main deciding factor in how I turned out. I work for wages in a large company, will never be a board member because I’m not willing to put in the hours above-and-beyond that are required (see the opening note about having two kids – and I want to know them as they grow). I’m a professional engineer and can have as easy or difficult of a life as I want now. I don’t know everything (and never will), but I know enough to add value to the company I work for, so they agree to keep paying me. Life is good.
I want my kids to be able to make the same kinds of choices as I have, so I’ll be overseeing and testing their education and general knowledge base as long as I live. If the public system tries to actively make them stupid we’ll pull them out, but until then, it’s another tool to help my wife and I teach our kids.
Thanks for that information. Passed it onto my mother to help my brother who is home schooling my niece. Should help them out at lot.
Common sense reins at SDA! I’m really impressed with what a lot of parents are doing with their young children: Remember, parents are the first educators of their children (Lumen Gentium, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_Gentium). Far more parents need to take this authority and not leave it up to educational “experts” (sic). (They think they’re experts because they’ve got the corner offices and the salaries. Don’t believe them.)
Math is math. The answer to a problem is the same in every jurisdiction and system in the world.
According to frequent international test reports, some school systems are performing better than others. It would seem logical to identify the winners and to emulate what they are doing. Is that what happens? No!
We insist on having a unique, exciting, expensive and novel “made in Alberta (or Ontario, B.C. etc.) solution” with thousands of students in the role of lab rats.
those in here quacking about not teaching memory math (memorizing X tables and such) are clueless. I used to win math competitions, and memorized tables formed the base of my ability. Memorizing “burns” memory paths in the brain that pretty much stay with you for life, if they fade some what it’s easy to reestablish them, even at my age. At 66 I can still tell a pup when they have screwed up with the “Jooish piano” (cash register), and it just amazes them. They don’t know math, period
Agreed that math is math. I was talking to a number of junior engineers and asked them the difference between an art and a science. I went on to say that, to me, a science is something in which multiple people can do the same thing the same way and get the same result. An art is something that multiple people can do with the same information and inputs and get different results. Making a geologic model or running strip-ratio surface shells for planning mining areas are sciences. Designing the pits are an art. Even when working on an art, an engineer should always remember scientific principles.
Many companies work on best practices to identify the best ways to do things. This is using what you’re saying: identify what works best, and practice it. Sadly, the public sector doesn’t have the same incentives as the private: the costs of failure are borne by the taxpayer instead of by the company or shareholder. Even the cost of losing everything spent on a project for little gain isn’t enough to stop a government. Unless government workers (those elected to oversite, those in direct boards, or those in bureaucracies overseeing a field) see a direct relationship between literacy or international rankings (in math or sciences) and their paychecks, there’s no reason for the government to promote what works.
There’s also a reason that elected officials and public school teachers in the US are the most likely to have their kids attend private schools. When the results will hit close to home, they practice different incentives and rules.
We home school. Ten or fifteen minutes a day of math practice, a few minutes of “mental arithmetic”, plus 20 minutes a day of Khan Academy all add up. Especially as home school runs all year – week off at Christmas. It is not that my boys are math whizzes but they are fluent. Which means that math is a tool in their general tool box.
It is fun to watch my older son (13) “discover” math as he uses Sketch Up to plan the concrete topped bench he wants to make. I don’t tell him how much concrete it will take. Nor do I tell him how to calculate cubic dimensions. Nor do I tell him how much his proposed bench top will weigh or why it might not be such a great idea to have something which weighs that much as a piece of furniture. He figures all that out himself. And then he goes online to see what he can do to make it light enough that we won’t have to use a forklift to move it.
People learn things they can use very quickly indeed. Especially if they have Google to query on stuff they don’t know.
And that’s why we home school. We teach them what we want in the manner that’s best for each kid. All 5 of them.
BUT.
If the generations coming into the work force can add,do percentages and calculate compound interest, we are screwed.
Are we not, as a society, counting on their ignorance to finance the scams we have running?
If a clear eyed, educated student looks honestly at the rate of return they will receive for their labour, realizes the percentage they will be permitted to keep and compounds this societal theft into the future.
Then we have a motivational problem.
Reverse incentives do not encourage productive behaviour.
We mortgaged our grandchildren’s futures so we could have a welfare state.
Why would we want to tell this shrunken generation what we have done to their future for our venal interests today?.
Deliberately destroying their mathematical schooling is necessary for the state parasites survival.
It is in our “national interest”.
Tried and true methods of teaching math (among other things) are not used because…?
When teaching the basics, there really is no room for “innovation”.
One of today’s progressive buzzwords is “evidence-based”. Yet they try to foist ideological fads like “discovery math” without the slightest shred of evidence that they will do the job.
“The biggest outrage is the use of IPads in math class…sheesh!”
Someone upthread said that and I want to expand on that, in saying that computers should be taken out of grade-school classrooms. I see no reason computers are of use until, roughly, grade 10 and probably hinder natural development of reading comprehension, math fundamentals and science insight. I believe that computers are the root of the modern educational(including grubby unions) problem.
2 pesos.
No they are not…its called “Whole Word Learning”…and it is complete BULLSHIT. Phoenics is the only way to learn how words sound and spell.
same with the garbage math being foisted upon our kids.
The only way that works..is ROTE: 2 X 2 is 4, 2 X 3 is 6 ad nauseautum…it may be boring, but without excellent addition, subtraction division and multiplication skills, they will go nowhere in algebra and trig.
But try telling that to the arrogant/ignorant progressive left who infest our schools.