Reply to Does compact math get your ready for IM?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A mom who was born abroad once drew a graph for me about the problem with math in the U.S.

Basically you have time on the x axis and the y axis is knowledge expected. From K-5 the line edges up very slowly. It's not exactly flat but you're not really moving too quickly.  But then in 6th-12th you suddenly have to climb a steep mountain and that's where lots of kids start to fail. In her home country the build up was more like a straight line and steady so kids did not crash once they got to pre-Algebra or Algebra.

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I heard similar things from an admin at mcps.  Their explanation was that it's intentional that the slope is almost flat then exponentially climbs during the late middle school years.  It was purposefully by the greats mcps minds because they want to ensure that kids have a solid foundation with the early years.  Therefore, they keep it very slow and drill kids on five different ways to multiply 3x4.  They have to draw it draw it out onto different charts, demonstrating mastery of different methods.  Explain it by words.  As a math major, I feel this is pretty dumb!  My kids are so confuse trying to do the different methods that they actually make more careless mistakes.  Furthermore, they know different ways of solving 3x4 but they get so little practice with fluency as part of the curriculum.  Now, I tell them to tolerate the method, but at home we teach them the overall concept and focus on fluency.[/quote]

Yes, but what is the MCPS solution, actually?  It's drag algebra 1 out into a three year course, and leave most of the symbolic math to pre-calc.  So instead of feeling an abrupt change with algebra, kids are going through courses called algebra, geometry, algebra 2, without actually learning the content that used to be in those classes.  It's not that the content is somehow outmoded, because as of pre-calc they need to catch up in a hurry.  And this actually means there is a longer gap between arithmetic and symbolic math.  By the time they're first asked to symbolically find a common denominator for a rational function in pre-calc, the ES lessons were four years in the past.

Now there's a slow steady line from k-algebra 2, and a burst of material after that (for those who reach pre-calc before graduating HS, that is).  Anyway, I think most commenters have students in ES or just entering MS.  Like OP, my oldest is a freshman in college.  My youngest is in 10th, so I've witnessed the curriculum twice now, and the second time I was quite vigilant.[/quote]

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