Did this type of thing not come up for your son? What did you do to get past it for him?
Yes, it came up with him, too. They were rigid about the critical need to do all of second grade math as prescribed in the Everyday Math textbook. To the school's credit, they offered him a grade skip about four months later, but they still wanted him to do the 3rd grade math workbook on his own. At the final conference of the year, the teacher told me that "he might even be able to go past that!" He had almost finished 5th grade math with me at that point.
A similar conceptual block happened with science in fourth grade. Again, the teacher thought that it was simply not right to let a kid do 5th grade science if he hadn't done all of 4th grade science. She didn't seem to see that it was the same course, except with bigger words and more detail in the 5th grade course.
We finally got past it with a second grade skip into a small school run by a gifted guy. Sorry to say the school was acquired and the new owner changed it completely.
So he's homeschooling now.
The blog post at Ultramarina's link was disturbing, not too surprising (
), and clarifying. It explains a lot about the geometry book I've complained about, the weird homework my DD has been bringing home, and a lot of other things. I swear, things would be pretty bad for us without the web and the online booksellers.
I believe that my daughter's teachers (and most other teachers/schools) really do want to help kids. But there's a lot of evidence indicating that many or most of them don't have the mathematical background required for making proper evaluations of the the flashy textbooks that get pushed by the big publishers. And yet that certainty comes in here: even in that blog post, the author emphasized that the books should be written by
educators. She didn't really mention subject experts with graduate degrees in mathematics. This is almost as depressing.
