No Textbooks Honors Algebra 2 Can't Get Ahead Is Pre-Cal Any Better?
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Anonymous
| MCPS does not believe in textbooks. |
Anonymous
My HS kid has a whole pile in her room.. |
Anonymous
I thought that everyone would pre-read the chapter of the week for all subjects. That way in class you can focus on the discussion and taking good notes and not worry about it being the first time you have heard concepts/ terms. |
Anonymous
Mine too. But, they are all over my living room! Grrr. |
Anonymous
| Which HS? |
Anonymous
This is a you problem, if a textbook isn’t helping. I am a tutor. Alg II covers largely the same material everywhere. If you have gotten a textbook and it isn’t helping then the problem is that your child doesn’t know how to “read” and apply the text and class notes. Some kids have trouble pulling what is salient out of a larger discussion/text, some kids have trouble applying it, some kids have trouble moving between abstract patterns and real number problems. Other problems that present in Alg II - poor algebraic manipulation skills, poor fundamental computation skills in fractions or exponents or roots, weak math fact recall, poor organization of work. Another very common problem is that students don’t corect their homework fully and understand their mistakes. Make sure your child is checking every. single. homework. answer & understanding and correcting her mistakes. Get a tutor that comes weekly on Wed. Tutor should help review previous 2 days of homework, help student with that night’s homework and help identify what is important to memorize for test and how to do processes. |
Anonymous
It's hard to correct homework when there is no answer key. The answer keys are posted days later often Wednesday/Thursday night. Often the answer keys have errors in them too which makes it harder. The class also doesn't follow a textbook so she has to figure out what the concept is called in whatever textbook she's using (we have several). Sometimes she can't find the answer in one textbook and has to look at others. Other times it's Khan Academy that helps. It's just really minimal information. |
Anonymous
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Not in Mont Co, but not having a textbook is very common in all subjects and a pet peeve of mine.
I'm surprised more people don't complain. My pre-calc son's class is all over the place, from trig to other concepts and doesn't seem to follow any online curriculum that I have found. It is hard, especially if a kid has scheduled tutoring. |
Anonymous
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If it helps, MCPS has the curriculum of the regular (not calculus or statistics) math pathway posted for every class:
https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/curriculum/math/high/algebra2/ |
Anonymous
Are they going over the homework in class? Maybe the teacher doesn’t want the kids to be changing their answers before they’ve had a chance to go over the work in class so the teacher can see what kind of mistakes are being made. Then the teacher can plan how to teach and how quickly to move through topics by seeing how well the students are grasping the material through class lessons. If the kids can look at the answer key and change their answers before class, the teacher can’t see how well they are learning the material. It does the student’s learning of the material no good for it to appear that they understand the material better than they actually do. |
Anonymous
That's stupid. It's common advice to preview the material so that you can get more out of the class lectures/exercises. And if it takes you longer to digest and master the concepts, reading ahead also helps. |
Anonymous
I mean all your advice is valid, but expecting the student to re-write the course on the fly is a little much. The issue really is the way the class has been concocted by MCPS. If the teacher goes above and beyond the issues are masked. Part of knowing how to read a textbook is having had classes taught from a textbook. E.g. something as simple as having a teacher tell students that the day's lesson is also explained in the book. But MCPS's whole shtick is that their packets replace a text, and whatever the teacher says in class stands on it's own. And, all Algebra 2 is not the same, MCPS is does not teach it as algebraic manipulation. When logs are introduced it is as the inverse graph of the exponential function, the algebraic properties of logs are not taught until pre-calc. Change of basis is not taught until pre-calc. For that matter, finding the inverse of a function, by algebraic manipulation is not taught until pre-calc. An interesting exercise is, go to the MCPS curriculum guides, and focus on the parenthetical notes, which all explain something explicitly forbidden in the class. E.g. rationalizing a denominator is not a required skill in algebra 2, teachers can't request that. But there's an opportunity to practice a fundamental skills missed. One of the course topics is trig identities but if you read the parenthetical note, the only identity actually covered is the pythagorean identity. And so on, and so on. It's a shell game of a class. And as far as doing all the homework and making sure it's correct, these are not long assignments, usually three or four problems--another time a book, with problem sets would be nice to have. |
Anonymous
Homework is usually a completion grade, they give it a checkmark at the beginning of the period. |
Anonymous
No wonder we have such low expectations of teachers when students teach themselves everything beforehand. If ditching textbooks curbs this, I am in favor of no textbooks. |
Anonymous
Well, what about reviewing material after the class? You never had the experience of taking notes in class and then feeling like you'd missed something when it came time to complete an assignment. The notion that teachers can present material once and everyone can then just carry on with notes is ludicrous. Some people benefit from a second, possibly slightly different presentation. Sometimes teachers teach something incorrectly. Last year my DC had a sub on the day that conditional probability was presented and the notes he took down were pure gibberish and the sample problems were incorrect. |