Reply to anyone else have a 4th grader in MCPS who can't quickly rattle off multiplication facts?

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Reply to "anyone else have a 4th grader in MCPS who can't quickly rattle off multiplication facts?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]It is well and good that people think parents should be teaching this at home. What about parents who are not able to do this--maybe they have two jobs, or have health or other problems, or don't have a lot of schooling themselves. Are their kids just not supposed to learn these things? This is a school's job to teach and if they can't teach basic math facts to mastery they are not teaching.[/quote]

This is a good point and why there is such a huge achievement gap in MCPS and why there is so much anger over 2.0 math. MCPS really needs to increase the resource allocation of math specialists and math rigor in the curriculum if it wants to address the achievement gap. 2.0 went in the opposite direction. Less rotor, less depth, and just slower with more repetition isn't going to work. If someone says something to you in a foreign language that you don't know, saying it slower over and over again isn't going to work. At some point, the person has to point to what they are referring to or show you what the sounds mean..fast or slow. Same thing is going on with math. There will be some success in hiding the lower achievers because the high achieving kids who are supplemented at home will be in the same class several levels below their ability BUT if anyone compares the score data against socio-economic background the gap will be worse.

The other pervasive problem is that the people writing 2.0 don't understand math at all. An education major is one of the easiest majors and requires very little challenging coursework. The teachers/educational specialists can convey what there were told about how to teach math but this all verbal and writing based and doesn't come from any mastery or understanding of the subject. 2.0 really reflects this in an amazing way. The problem "Explain why 2X3 =6" in sentences is asking a kid to write back what the teacher verbally said about multiplication. Its familiar to the teacher but conveys no deeper meaning than solving the problem or showing a series of equations.

They also miss the point that drill is actually not about memorization. In order to learn math, you need to do math, not write about it. The more equations and number interactions a child encounters and solves, the more patterns he or she sees and understands. 
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