Administrators and teachers seem almost willfully stupid about this. I mean, it COULD work-- if 9 year olds had the life experience and background of 25 year olds who have already "learned" this material before, or seen many, many real world applications of it over a long period of time. But 9yo children don't have that.
I was thinking about this idea last night. My kids' math teacher is a committed spiralist (?). On back-to-school night, she said that she doesn't move through one section of a book at time, nor does she assign more than one problem of the same type at a time. This is because when kids get more than one similar problem, they're "memorizing and not understanding."
My kids typically come home with problems spread across 4-6 sections in 2+ chapters, as well as individual problems from unrelated worksheets. Miss T. also skipped the basic decimal chapter (Chapter 9) in favor of advanced decimals (Chapter 13) and everything in between. Then she got angry with the kids for "not getting something that's so easy." So she went back to chapter 9, but still simultaneously assigns stuff from Chapter 13. Her algorithms are equally bad (e.g. to divide 9 by 0.3, just divide by 3 and move the decimal point. No explanation for why is given.).
She
really, truly believes that this is the best way to teach math, and that all other methods are epic failures that don't create "understanding."
