Reply to NYTimes: In South Korea, Questions About Cram Schools, Success and Happiness

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The thing I keep thinking over and over again is that I was foolish to have trusted my pretty nice public schools to teach math K-5.  They did a bad job though I don't blame teachers.  Our teachers did what they were told as best they could.  By which I mean showing all those model diagrams, encouraging math exploration with manipulatives,  doing small group differentiated instruction with all levels in one class, experimenting with math video games.

[b]Drill and kill would have worked better.[/b]  I should have worked with my kids on IXL.  I don't think they would have liked Beast Academy or RSM. [b] I personally don't like Kumon.[/b]  Mine did Mathnasium in middle school and high school.  And it was okay but expensive.  And my older lacks math intuition.  Just like me.

[b]So Asian/Asian-American parents make their kids do this stuff.  I just wish I had[/b].  You don't need to go all the way to cram school to foster more comfort with elementary math.[/quote]

Your post doesn't make any sense. You say drill and kill would have been better but then you say you don't like Kumon, which is drill and kill to get down the basics of math. It is like practicing scales and the fundamentals when learning to play an instrument. You wish you had made your kids do more math but then weren't willing to put in the time to make your kids do Kumon. You can't have it both ways. [/quote]

Did you read the part where I said I would have used IXL?  IXL is adaptive and I only really learned how to use the parent controls when my kids were older and I paid for it myself.  By that point, I couldn't make them do the program so going to Mathnasium was my best option.

IXL is cheap.  Kumon Centers are not.  And I don't like their worksheets or their price/value relationship or the inflexibility on parent expectations. Using your music analogy, I don't want to do scales alongside my child (family involvement Suzuki) and I don't want to get scolded because my kids didn't do X scales in a week.

What I needed was a whole different Common Core math curriculum that was digitized and under my control.  While my kids were in elementary school and still biddable.  Then I could have done what their classroom teachers did not have time to do and focus on correcting gaps.  IXL is good enough for a few hundred dollars a year.

My kids were in the advanced track for our district (reaching AP calc).  Some of their shocking gaps:

-poor speed at math facts
-did not understand and apply PEMDAS correctly
-could not remember how to do long division due to being taught lattice method or "do whatever method with several poorly demoed"
-bad at doing operations with fractions.  Converts them mentally into decimals and approximates the answer

All of the wandering around math centers, coloring pictures of squares, paragraph-long word problems, allegedly differentiated small group instruction that rarely got administered to the top kids, and Prodigy were destructive in my view. Similar to Readers' Workshop and "Sold a Story".  My district was told what the best practices were and they invested in them, trained the teachers, and the curriculums did not work as advertised.  My district has discarded both the reading curriculum and the math curriculum that my kids had K-5.

Drill and kill to me does mean more worksheets and memorization.  More rote fluency.   My foreign friends have this background and I do not.  And they are better at math.  In part because I went to a rather lackadaisical 1970s Bay Area elementary school.  My grandma, a trained elementary teacher, spent a summer catching me up around 4th grade.  I just thought my own kids had a better school and learned more.  Until we got midway through the pandemic and I realized the wheels were coming off the metaphorical bus.  Mathnasium still required face masks when they started there.

It's true that I could have invested more of my own time teaching my kids outside of school.  But I didn't really realize I should have until too late. I partly fixed it but it cost about $650/mo. for Mathnasium for quite a while (middle school and high school enrollment costs more than elementary).  Still cheaper than living in a "better" school district.[/quote]

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