Reply to The decade-long "learning recession"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is really a school created problem.

When schools noticed that top students deeply understood math concepts, they changed the curriculum for everyone. They assumed that forcing all children to learn through abstract, big-picture thinking would automatically make them better at math. However, this ignored how math skills actually develop.

High-performing students often master the rules, formulas, and repetitive practice first, using that solid foundation to unlock deeper conceptual understanding later. By removing traditional math practice and drill-work from classrooms, schools left average and struggling students without the basic tools they need, ultimately making them worse at both the formulas and the concepts.

For example, students spend a massive amount of wasted time as teachers get them to draw out pictures and circles to understand multiplication, talk about it, and try to construct their own understanding and problem-solving methods. This visual drawing process takes so much more time than traditional math. Furthermore, when they manually count up all those drawings, they have no real way of confirming if the problem is correct because they have no automatic recall to verify it against.

If schools just had students memorize the multiplication tables first, and then did a couple of days' worth of conceptual understanding, the students would have it down quickly. Instead, math students now get no real procedural, repetitive practice, so they don't really develop conceptual knowledge either. They are just low in math all around. [/quote]

Different curriculum works for different kids.  Homeschool parents understand this.  Some kids do very well with conceptual, abstract math and they don't need repetition.  Other kids need traditional math with algorithms and multiplication tables.  I think math is where ed tech makes the most sense.  Put the top kids in something like AoPS and put the struggling kids in a program in a more traditional program. [/quote]

This is not true. All kids need to nail down math facts. Some do it more quickly and instinctively than others, but the way they learn is not different.

Ed Tech does not help at all here. [/quote]

You are wrong. My youngest did not need help nailing down math facts beyond Beast Academy.  She is the fastest kid in her class at school on math facts, and she's never done drills at home.  The only math supplementing we've done is BA, and we do it at home, not at a center, and we are not math inclined ourselves - we just follow their script, and she knows all her math facts cold and can mentally add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit numbers. We've never done flashcards, plaid math games (outside of BA), etc.  This would not have worked for our other kids, but it's worked very well for her. [/quote]

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