Coming in late here.

My son's previous school used Everyday Math. He hated, hated it.

I analyzed the curriculum and I think I understand the idea of what they're trying to do. If my interpretation was correct, EM's goal is to teach children to understand mathematical concepts by showing variety of ways to solve a problem. This was a response to what was perceived as poor outcomes that came from depending too heavily on learning one or at most two algorithms. It's a good idea in some ways, but I think it's poorly implemented.

I have a few main criticisms of the program:

1. There are too many areas where there is no correct answer. Example: when kids are learning to use a ruler, they have to measure a few things at home. Because the teacher has no way of knowing the lengths of the objects each student measures, s/he has no way of knowing if the child is using the ruler correctly. There were a lot of instances of this sort of thing through the grade 5 books.

2. There was a lot of busy work: e.g., cut out pictures of triangles (in the second grade!), name the presidents on the coins and one thing they did, write a story. I found myself writing "This is not mathematics!" every week or two on homework assignments.

3. There were flaws that could lead to confusion. Overall, I thought that the people who designed the curriculum didn't realize that things that look obvious to adults don't look obvious to kids seeing something for the first time.

Example, one of the methods for teaching addition uses a chart that looks like a calendar (numbered up to 100). Each new 10 starts at the end of a line, rather than the beginning, so 20 is on another line from 21-29. This could make understanding the concepts of new tens confusing (they're a beginning, not an end).

Kids were supposed to learn to add, say, 15 + 7 by starting at box #15 and "jumping" 7 spots with their fingers. This assumes that kids intuitively understand that moving to the right and down a line is "more" and moving left and up a line is "less."

EM didn't use manipulatives, which seems to me to show the whole point of addition/subtraction ("I get more blocks/chips/whatever" when I add).

4. Finally, the spiralling nature of EM (do method #1 for a few days, move to method #2, then to #3 then back to something more complicated with #1) can mean that kids who get confused early on, stay confused.

Overall, I think the system can lead to serious misconceptions about the foundations of mathematics. I've it works for some kids, but I'm concerned about its overall effect.

Will stop there! But I could go on.

Val