Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I really think that so many parents find multiple strategies difficult speaks to exactly how low American math skills really are.
Back in the day I was a pretty strong math student who hung it up after BC calc. But the essential difference was that as a student I was never expected to do something in more than one way or (far more importantly) to understand what I was doing, whether it was why a formula actually worked or what the real-world application of an integral might be. It was as if the truth lay somewhere just over a hill that we were never made to climb. And the people who could grasp that truth intuitively were the people who were really and truly good at this, not just the people who got As and 5s. I saw and admired the difference.
Whether the current multi-strategy curriculum will produce more people who can see math in that way remains an open question. It certainly helps _me_ understand why things are the way they are, but only in retrospect. My DCs certainly don't grasp the big picture, and I'm not sure too many kids will reach that understanding on their own.
I don't think they will reach understanding better with newer methods. My kids got to 8th grade and 5th grade math (part-year) before Covid when all went haywire. They were/are on the regular advanced track for our district. Oldest ended with Calc AB and 680 Math. Did not want to take BC because of planning a humanities major.
They didn't learn long division properly, memorize order of operations, or cross-multiply correctly. I have sent each to 3 years of Mathnasium to clean up the mess. They do not like Math enough to do Khan Academy or IXL by themselves. And we wanted homework tutoring. This worked but was an expensive intervention.
Repeated exposure, practice with a tutor, and extra time on topics helped where manipulating models and multistrategies did not create insight or math fluency.