Teachers having a hard time teaching the new math

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Don't you people ever get tired of whining the same things every day?

The only way to change something is to bitch and complain and be as much of a squeaky wheel as possible. OP I am with you. This is ridiculous!! Math has been taught the same way for a hundred years now some stupid ass Mother EFFers with some kind of sinister political agenda have decided to turn our worlds upside down.

HATE IT!!

Yes, math has been taught the same way for a hundred years now -- namely, badly. The sinister political agenda here is to improve the teaching of math.

[Anonymous]

We haven't seen this problem to the degree you have, OP. I'd personally want to bring it up as a concern with your school. Schools have math content specialists who could help deal with this issue.

[Anonymous]

How about we ask Jeff for an MCPS math complaints forum?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How about we ask Jeff for an MCPS math complaints forum?

I love this idea.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Oddly, there isn't anything all that new about the actual math strategies in 2.0. Decomposing has been around forever. I find it really strange how MCPS is acting or pretending that it is has invented this new way.

2.0 is just really disorganized and they don't have the materials together which isn't fair to the teachers or the students. All it would take would be a wee bit of competence to create better materials, examples, and organize this into a logical flow. Doing something really bad very slow and repeating it again and again doesn't magically produce a good result in the end. Its a really poor excuse for a curriculum. Sad.

For my child in elementary school, I found it necessary to supplement with private instruction so he had core fundamental concepts under his belt. What he was being taught in school (whether it was a bad curriculum or a bad implementation of a good curriculum) did not make sense and the units jumped around from this concept to that concept. My son soon outpaced his peers and I believe it was because of the Singapore curriculum we supplemented with at home. I did not whine or complain because with elementary math, there was something I could do about the problem and my child had time in the afternoon to do the extra supplementary work.

I now have a child in high school that I don't know what the hell MCPS is thinking with the new 2.0 Geometry. No textbook, no clear path from the teacher, and even the Geometry webpage was down till this past Monday. I was concerned enough to talk with the teacher, the math resource teacher and the principal because my child was struggling in the course and I could not make heads or tails of what was going on. This is what I was told - the course is still being written, the teachers are only provided one unit at a time, the textbook does not align with the curriculum, the instructional resources are lacking because they are still being developed, and each school in the county teaching the course is coming up with their own plan on how the course should be taught. The course is complete chaos because in reality, MCPS is still determining what the curriculum should be for the course. The school has seen huge disconnects in the path to where the kids need get to so they are rethinking and redeveloping the course as it moves along through the school year.

The rolling out of new curriculums before they have been fully developed, resources written, and teachers trained is asinine. Our kids are going to be worse off than earlier generations because they are not going to be well prepared for college and higher learning. There are going to be some serious gaps in fundamental skills with MCPS's educational experiment gone amuck.

[Anonymous]

Algebra 2.0 was a huge problem last year. Lots of teachers that had been successful Algebra teachers in the past and understand math had a very hard time with the new curriculum. After the disaster in ES, they really should have stopped and fixed things before pushing the problems into middle school. These are smart, capable teachers. They are given vague, unclear direction similar to the non-sense parents complain about when they read the sanctioned MCPS PR stuff about 2.0. It doesn't translate into an actual curriculum. Its just a bunch of poorly constructed industry lingo that someone, somewhere thinks sounds good. The materials aren't there and teachers were up until midnight trying to create materials and lesson plans.

The teacher's union did go after MCPS for the ES problems. MCPS had to yield several million for training and a commitment to finish the materials.

I would cut the teacher some slack. As bad as you think 2.0 is for your kid, your teachers are trying to make it better and its just as awful for them!

[Anonymous]

No textbook, no clear path from the teacher, and even the Geometry webpage was down till this past Monday. I was concerned enough to talk with the teacher, the math resource teacher and the principal because my child was struggling in the course and I could not make heads or tails of what was going on. This is what I was told - the course is still being written, the teachers are only provided one unit at a time, the textbook does not align with the curriculum, the instructional resources are lacking because they are still being developed, and each school in the county teaching the course is coming up with their own plan on how the course should be taught. The course is complete chaos because in reality, MCPS is still determining what the curriculum should be for the course. The school has seen huge disconnects in the path to where the kids need get to so they are rethinking and redeveloping the course as it moves along through the school year.

The rolling out of new curriculums before they have been fully developed, resources written, and teachers trained is asinine. Our kids are going to be worse off than earlier generations because they are not going to be well prepared for college and higher learning. There are going to be some serious gaps in fundamental skills with MCPS's educational experiment gone amuck.

+1000

The most idiotic statement I have heard on this forum is that "they have been teaching math wrong" Really? Somehow we have managed to graduate engineers and students who do very well in college.

I think what is missing from the MCPS mindset is that our children don't get these years back in Geometry/Math instruction while they are the test subjects for their new curriculum. Look at the 2.28 BILLION dollar operating budget, where 1.47 billion are for salaries... don't you think they have enough staff to write a curriculum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

No textbook, no clear path from the teacher, and even the Geometry webpage was down till this past Monday. I was concerned enough to talk with the teacher, the math resource teacher and the principal because my child was struggling in the course and I could not make heads or tails of what was going on. This is what I was told - the course is still being written, the teachers are only provided one unit at a time, the textbook does not align with the curriculum, the instructional resources are lacking because they are still being developed, and each school in the county teaching the course is coming up with their own plan on how the course should be taught. The course is complete chaos because in reality, MCPS is still determining what the curriculum should be for the course. The school has seen huge disconnects in the path to where the kids need get to so they are rethinking and redeveloping the course as it moves along through the school year.

The rolling out of new curriculums before they have been fully developed, resources written, and teachers trained is asinine. Our kids are going to be worse off than earlier generations because they are not going to be well prepared for college and higher learning. There are going to be some serious gaps in fundamental skills with MCPS's educational experiment gone amuck.

+1000

The most idiotic statement I have heard on this forum is that "they have been teaching math wrong" Really? Somehow we have managed to graduate engineers and students who do very well in college.

I think what is missing from the MCPS mindset is that our children don't get these years back in Geometry/Math instruction while they are the test subjects for their new curriculum. Look at the 2.28 BILLION dollar operating budget, where 1.47 billion are for salaries... don't you think they have enough staff to write a curriculum.

Since we are on this point, should not they have enough resources to write a new final math exam every year as well?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

+1000

The most idiotic statement I have heard on this forum is that "they have been teaching math wrong" Really? Somehow we have managed to graduate engineers and students who do very well in college.

I think what is missing from the MCPS mindset is that our children don't get these years back in Geometry/Math instruction while they are the test subjects for their new curriculum. Look at the 2.28 BILLION dollar operating budget, where 1.47 billion are for salaries... don't you think they have enough staff to write a curriculum.

Yes, that's true. We have also managed to graduate lots and lots and lots of people who do not understand math and cannot do math.

Read here, for example: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html?_r=0

And we get into regular panics about not enough US-born people going into engineering and math.

Also, MCPS did write a new curriculum. And then they rolled it out. If they test the new curriculum, people complain: MY CHILD IS BEING USED AS A GUINEA PIG! If they don't test the new curriculum, people complain: MCPS IS FORCING AN UNTESTED CURRICULUM ON MY CHILD! How do you think that MCPS should solve this problem, besides never ever changing the curriculum?

[Anonymous]

Its very stupid that in 21st century a county-level group of administrators thought the best course of action was for them to write a curriculum on their own. Ignorance and arrogance is a very dangerous thing. There are university reviewed high quality curriculums out there with materials for them to adopt. There are 32 other countries that outpace the US in math. Not every country has its curriculum documented and available to the US but many do.

Do you think that top private schools hire 50+ 3rd tier state and community college educated, former C students to sit in a bubble and make shit up? No! They adopt research driven curriculums and materials. They also…now wait for it…..make sure that the students actually work to their potential. This means that if the student fails something, they get an F not a P. The private school is contacting the parents, requiring tutoring, requiring that the student demonstrate improvement or the kid is counseled out. MCPS is passing them along and just dropping down the standards for everyone else.

[Anonymous]

Its very stupid that in 21st century a county-level group of administrators thought the best course of action was for them to write a curriculum on their own. Ignorance and arrogance is a very dangerous thing. There are university reviewed high quality curriculums out there with materials for them to adopt. There are 32 other countries that outpace the US in math. Not every country has its curriculum documented and available to the US but many do.

Do you think that top private schools hire 50+ 3rd tier state and community college educated, former C students to sit in a bubble and make shit up? No! They adopt research driven curriculums and materials. They also…now wait for it…..make sure that the students actually work to their potential. This means that if the student fails something, they get an F not a P. The private school is contacting the parents, requiring tutoring, requiring that the student demonstrate improvement or the kid is counseled out. MCPS is passing them along and just dropping down the standards for everyone else.

I love you.

Yes, that's true. We have also managed to graduate lots and lots and lots of people who do not understand math and cannot do math.

If it is MCPS's goal to graduate even more students that do not understand and cannot do math then they are succeeding with this hacked up curriculum.

Does the very clear Geometry example that the previous poster described not bother you? If it doesn't then step away from the keyboard and bury your head back in the MCPS sandbox.

[Anonymous]

Just to let you know, before comma core, 2.0 or anything else my now 9th grader used to come home with spelling lists 3x a month in elementary school. Another mom and I used to joke at how many of these basic words were spelled wrong by the teacher. By the Spring it was 7 words.

So not all teachers are good teachers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

If it is MCPS's goal to graduate even more students that do not understand and cannot do math then they are succeeding with this hacked up curriculum.

Does the very clear Geometry example that the previous poster described not bother you? If it doesn't then step away from the keyboard and bury your head back in the MCPS sandbox.

There's a big difference between "MCPS's roll-out of the new geometry curriculum has problems" and "MCPS's new math teaching is awful, and we have to go back to the good old way."

[Anonymous]

Since we are on this point, should not they have enough resources to write a new final math exam every year as well?

OMG! Don't get me started! If MCPS was a private business people would have been FIRED over that fiasco, but instead it's just more of the same old, same old. Did the teachers who were skipping sections (due to snow days and test prep) not bring this up to who they report to, I bet they did and were ignored. No one takes responsibility in MCPS.

[Anonymous]

There's a big difference between "MCPS's roll-out of the new geometry curriculum has problems" and "MCPS's new math teaching is awful, and we have to go back to the good old way."

The ONLY people who make this distinction are the MCPS boobs trying to cling to 2.0 because they can't admit they screwed up. They have problems on both fronts. Very flawed curriculum design has led to a complete failure in implementation.