Reply to how to address a teacher who cannot teach?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] Your child is going to have to deal with incompetence their whole life, whether it's a coworker, a boss, or one of their own employees. Getting used to working with a wide variety of people is a good thing.  You not bashing the teacher in front of your child will go a long way. Her communication style is just different. Truly it will benefit your child learning to work with this teacher. And in the meantime you're doing the right thing as far as tutors and extra help for your child.[/quote]
This is spot on. There will be situations in life where she just has to buckle down, do her own research, and get through it. The outcome may not be an A, but I bet she will learn a lot from the process. I'm sorry she has a bad teacher, but it's good practice for all the bad supervisors she'll have. [/quote]
For OP, yes, good advice. But given county advice to limit direct instruction on math generally (not just calculus), these may not be one-off occurrences. It's the younger teachers (who OP's child has) that are most likely to be following the guidance because they don't know otherwise and are still trying to establish themselves at the school and don't want to be marked down early in their careers.  [/quote]
NP here.  If this is the current advice, where/how is it playing out and could you point me to whatever research on math instruction that is driving it?  [/quote]
I am looking for a good overview piece. Many articles focus on one component which leads to a forest vs trees issue. Here's a short one which just notes the ongoing debate direct instruction and inquiry learning.
https://www.edutopia.org/article/direct-instruction-inquiry-based-learning

The underlying view of education schools, NCTM, and most state and district math offices is the constructivist idea that students should discover things rather than be taught them. As such, they think direct instruction (sage on a stage) leads to rote learning, boredom, lack of conceptual understanding. They favor teachers acting as a "guide on the side", facilitating student learning, as well as project and problem based learning (PBL). Reformers value encouraging math discourse amongst students (which is often done in small groups), giving kids rich tasks to work on with no one right answer (to promote discussion and offer low floor-high ceiling exercises so all kids can participate in the discussion no matter their level of understanding). Are there benefits to both approaches? Sure. But student-led learning works better when they already have a base of knowledge to tap; it's not good for learning foundational concepts. Also, the more complicated the math topic, the more direct instruction is needed. That said, current reform thinking is veering increasingly toward limiting direct instruction which they think will increase student interest in math. As such, districts tell their teachers not to use direction instruction heavily, offer them PD and coaching to move away from direct instruction and mark them down if they do use it heavily. Some districts now want to use the Math Workshop model in middle and high schools too, where students rotate through stations. This is undermining students' ability to develop a core base of math knowledge and is leading to a boom for tutors, RSM, and AoPS which do explicitly teach the concepts.  [/quote]

This is nuts. How are the institutions responsible and tasked with education this inept and incompetent?[/quote]
It is the current consensus in K-12 education thinking. Like Lucy Calkins was until recently in language arts. Unfortunately, Calkins-like thinking still governs math.[/quote]

Yes, but this just runs contrary to common sense and the real-world. If students could teach themselves, what would be the role and purpose of teachers?

And these theories have to be proved out with research and experiments, which I presume they've done to substantiate this theory, that continue to fail when they're implemented outside of the confines of their labs. Which should tell them that their labs are unreliable proxies for education in the real world and to tread far more lightly.[/quote]
True. But when they fall short IRL, the proposed solution is often just more aggressive implementation of the original reform ideas.[/quote]

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