Anonymous wrote:My DC attends a upper NW school that does not use text books. I may be an old fart ( 40ish) but I don't remember getting so many hand-outs when I was in school, during the stone ages. She is in 3rd grade and was given a packet to do over the Holidays. The math homework is pretty much a review from the last couple of months. It would help me , if I could refer to chapters that she has gone over already.Also, it seems that, all everyone is concerned about is the DC-CAS test.
Is this the norm for 3rd grade to 12th grade?

I have been following this thread a little bit and was confused if most people responding were talking about elementary, middle or high school. I have a child in DCPS elementary and another in middle. In middle school there are textbooks for each class. In elementary it is more common that students do not have textbooks but workbooks. Regarding math we've had two teachers who do not use Everyday Math but use a more traditional approach for math instruction.

16:38 is right on.

And that same teacher should be able to differentiate across reading levels that span 7 grades.

And address the learning needs of ESL students. They compromised 1/2 of my child's first grade class. And that teacher should be able to address the 6 different languages that all those first graders spoke at home.

And she should be able to do all this for 24 children without any sort of assistant.

Yeah, those teachers are so, so lazy.

I mean, did you see those lazy teachers at Sandy Hook? One was found lying on the ground. She must have been napping on the job.

I do not think it is good for teachers of any subject area to be making their own curricula at all. It seems a phenomenal waste of time and there is a risk that the teacher is not a good enough content expert to develop such curricula materials. There are tons of curricula resources out there.

I think that every teacher should be a good enough content expert to write their own curriculum, and adjust that curriculum to a variety of learners. That's the job of teaching. There may be tons of curricular resources out there, but not very many of those resources are good.

13:01 here. The context is 2nd grade, not GREs. The questions are not about venting. I'm asking for others' experienced because I only know one school. Teachers and administrators sometimes say conflicting things.

The PIAs supposedly only take an hour and are supposed to help assess a child's progress, right? But some teachers tell us results aren't relevant. One said tests are "just practice" for the real test. The websites are used for homework practice. They are not supposed to have trick questions one teacher told me who agrees some if the wording is poor. "But it's what we are supposed to use." It seems like teachers are frustrated too. We have plenty of highly effective teachers and they are very diverse in age and backgrounds. The principal often says common core standards transition takes a while. No detail beyond that.

For those who feel their math teaching IS working well, please share specific books, sites, etc. It would be helpful to benchmark what our school is, or is not, using.

Anonymous wrote:Do high performing charters reinvent the wheel as well? What Singapore and other countries? We are also in ward 3 DCPS elementary. Our emerging concern is the inconsistency in materials. Some good. Some repetitive crap. Some even handwritten. There also seems to be too much practice on tactics for filling in the bubbles on a test and not enough on actually understanding word problems. One child told me he was told to just pick whichever answer is closest to his rather than checking his answer first. The latest thing is websites, 2 different ones, that seem too focused on multiple choice. It's not clear to me that the teachers have gone thrush all the questions themselves. It seems like there are one or two poorly constructed word problems a month. Our other child has better verbal comprehension than numeracy. He is less comfortable guessing than his sibling. At first he thought there were trick questions on purpose.

Supposedly the school is teaching more depth and less breadth. Is it possible to do that and test taking tactics to 6-8 year Olds?

Nothing wrong with students learning test-taking tactics, but part of that goes with critical thinking and common sense.

Like, don't procrastinate, wait until the last minute and then doing panicked cramming of everything the night before the exam.

Like, having the common sense to skip on to the next question and potentially come back to it later if you are stuck, rather than burning all your time on that one problem, running out of time and missing potentially easier questions later on in the exam.

Like, knowing if the answer to a math problem is at least in the correct order of magnitude, or has the correct units

Like, knowing enough of the content to be able to eliminate one or two of the possible multiple-choice answers right off the bat and increasing your odds of getting the right answer even if you have to guess

Like, knowing that there ARE what they call "logical distractors" - a/k/a "trick questions" to check and see if kids are applying critical thinking skills

But sadly, even for what other posters talk about with regard to "teaching to the test" or "teaching test-taking" they don't seem to even get fundamental things like that right.

It all begs the question, what in the hell ARE they teaching, given it evidently isn't content, and obviously isn't "test-taking".

22:03 - Are you saying the administration is who is asking teachers to forego cases of unopened textbooks costing millions, and to instead fudge their own curricula using handouts and whatever other nonsense?

Focus your frustration on the administration, not the teachers.

Do high performing charters reinvent the wheel as well? What Singapore and other countries? We are also in ward 3 DCPS elementary. Our emerging concern is the inconsistency in materials. Some good. Some repetitive crap. Some even handwritten. There also seems to be too much practice on tactics for filling in the bubbles on a test and not enough on actually understanding word problems. One child told me he was told to just pick whichever answer is closest to his rather than checking his answer first. The latest thing is websites, 2 different ones, that seem too focused on multiple choice. It's not clear to me that the teachers have gone thrush all the questions themselves. It seems like there are one or two poorly constructed word problems a month. Our other child has better verbal comprehension than numeracy. He is less comfortable guessing than his sibling. At first he thought there were trick questions on purpose.

Supposedly the school is teaching more depth and less breadth. Is it possible to do that and test taking tactics to 6-8 year Olds?

How much of English grammar, Math, Chemistry or most other middle-school and high-school content is actually different now than it was 10 years ago? Very little, IMHO. Current events and current history and geography - yes - but most other subjects and content, no.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here: the problem is that there are no resources the align with what we are teaching. We would need so many books for each child that it is a lot more efficient (believe it our not) to create our own materials. Is it ideal? Of course not.

yikes, I could not disagree with you more. It is not a smart use of time for every teacher in the district to make their own things.

Math teacher here - I also disagree. Given that good curricula and resources do exist, or could be created, it is just not an effective use of time for teachers to be creating or finding resources for almost every component of a lesson as well as homework. Of course materials will have to modified for some children, and some children will need completely different materials, but that further supports getting teachers better resources; it is just unrealistic to believe that teachers can create that many high-quality materials day after day. Furthermore, all teachers have strengths and weaknesses and it isn't smart to just trust that all teachers have a strong enough content background to be able to CREATE curricula.

Our society is constantly changing, there are plenty of things teachers can be learning and creating as they go - basic math curricula should not be one of them.

Sorry- I teach chemistry, not elementary math. I didn't mean to lead people into thinking that I did!

I do not think it is good for teachers of any subject area to be making their own curricula at all. It seems a phenomenal waste of time and there is a risk that the teacher is not a good enough content expert to develop such curricula materials. There are tons of curricula resources out there.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here: the problem is that there are no resources the align with what we are teaching. We would need so many books for each child that it is a lot more efficient (believe it our not) to create our own materials. Is it ideal? Of course not.

yikes, I could not disagree with you more. It is not a smart use of time for every teacher in the district to make their own things.

Math teacher here - I also disagree. Given that good curricula and resources do exist, or could be created, it is just not an effective use of time for teachers to be creating or finding resources for almost every component of a lesson as well as homework. Of course materials will have to modified for some children, and some children will need completely different materials, but that further supports getting teachers better resources; it is just unrealistic to believe that teachers can create that many high-quality materials day after day. Furthermore, all teachers have strengths and weaknesses and it isn't smart to just trust that all teachers have a strong enough content background to be able to CREATE curricula.

Our society is constantly changing, there are plenty of things teachers can be learning and creating as they go - basic math curricula should not be one of them.

Sorry- I teach chemistry, not elementary math. I didn't mean to lead people into thinking that I did!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here: the problem is that there are no resources the align with what we are teaching. We would need so many books for each child that it is a lot more efficient (believe it our not) to create our own materials. Is it ideal? Of course not.

yikes, I could not disagree with you more. It is not a smart use of time for every teacher in the district to make their own things.

Math teacher here - I also disagree. Given that good curricula and resources do exist, or could be created, it is just not an effective use of time for teachers to be creating or finding resources for almost every component of a lesson as well as homework. Of course materials will have to modified for some children, and some children will need completely different materials, but that further supports getting teachers better resources; it is just unrealistic to believe that teachers can create that many high-quality materials day after day. Furthermore, all teachers have strengths and weaknesses and it isn't smart to just trust that all teachers have a strong enough content background to be able to CREATE curricula.

Our society is constantly changing, there are plenty of things teachers can be learning and creating as they go - basic math curricula should not be one of them.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here: the problem is that there are no resources the align with what we are teaching. We would need so many books for each child that it is a lot more efficient (believe it our not) to create our own materials. Is it ideal? Of course not.

yikes, I could not disagree with you more. It is not a smart use of time for every teacher in the district to make their own things.

+1 What's being taught should not be so far out of alignment with standard curricula and textbooks that teachers have to completely invent their own materials. Supplementing with handouts here and there is fine, but having to come up with everything from scratch sounds very odd - and it's particularly questionable, given the poor results DC teachers are getting. It's probably not the textbooks that are the problem, it's the "inventive" curriculum and materials that are the problem.

Anonymous wrote:Teacher here: the problem is that there are no resources the align with what we are teaching. We would need so many books for each child that it is a lot more efficient (believe it our not) to create our own materials. Is it ideal? Of course not.

yikes, I could not disagree with you more. It is not a smart use of time for every teacher in the district to make their own things.

For poster 14:49

Here my argument - why should teachers have to be so creative teaching math in DCPS? All over the country, teacher rely on textbooks and teacher curriculum books to use best practices to teach mastery of the material.

All textbooks now are aligned with common core so I just don't understand why children can't have a well-written math textbook - Saxon, Harcourt, etc. Go online and check these resources out.

Everyday Math is silly and I continued to be shocked by its use.

And I am sure you are a thoughtful parent so I hope I don't come off as rude. I do grow tired of DCPS parents saying well my kids are doing well so all is well. I would like to say - not so fast. A lot of DC parents are highly, highly educated and I think the work at home (or dinner conversations, trips to museums, etc) that is done masks the mediocre education students receive in schools.

And, I think a strong math textbook can support a "crappy"" teacher. Although DCPS get points for moving "crappy" teachers out of the system.