Reply to Teachers having a hard time teaching the new math

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Teachers having a hard time teaching the new math"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.

[b]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. [/b]Sad. [/quote]

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. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics