Reply to School National Reading and Math Scores

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Both PISA and NAEP results have reported poor math results for the US for many years.

Various forms of "new math" curricula have been tried without improvement. What we do not do is teach math effectively. Many students, probably most students, do not get enough math practice. If we were good at teaching then the after school math centers would not be spread from coast to coast.

Other countries with high math scores in PISA teach students math methods that always work and [b]only teach one method per topic (e.g., Multiplication, division, algebra) so the students get enough practice to memorize that one method.[/quote][/b]

This times 1000. Bright students can handle being taught multiple methods to solve problems. Slower kids need to be taught one way until they master it. Imagine if your new neighbor asked you directions for how to get to Target and knowing that they were new to the area, you told them the simplest, most direct way. After time and many trips using that way, they might start trying other ways or not but they would know how to get to Target. Instead we teach kids all of the ways to get to Target in fairly quick succession. The result is some kids getting most or all of the ways correct and many kids having no idea how to get there. That's math education in public schools.

-a teacher[/quote]

I agree with this.  I have high educational attainment and finished calculus in college but I never got enough drilling in math.  I forgot a lot of what I learned K-12 because it was never drilled enough.   I sent my kids to a math franchise in middle and high school just to do more practice and to get 1:1 help.  My older one is similar to me in math intuition (not highly intuitive) but his skills are much more robust because he has better recall due to practice.  He could "get himself to Target".  I have to "Call an Uber".

I laugh bitterly when they talk about new "spiraling" math curriculums.  I think boring old "drill and kill" works better at certain key points.  Revisiting things briefly at random times isn't that much help.[/quote]

I agree, teaching the standard algorithm (and explaining why it works) benefits most kids, especially the strugglers. Kids aren’t drilled enough with number sense and fact fluency in the younger grades and it makes everything so much harder as they try to progress.

I’ve worked with two different “spiral curriculum” programs. One felt random but one did a great job truly reviewing things in a timely way so teachers could track whether skills were being retained or needed to be remediated. However, because of the time it took to include that daily review in the math time, it was phased out. Kids who aren’t retaining critical math skills in ES really do need to continue to review them; the problem I observed was that it was tough to get the pacing right between struggling gen ed students and the rest of the class.[/quote]

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