Originally Posted by polarbear
Originally Posted by Val
In summary, I ask myself, "Does this book have ADHD?"

I really have no advice to offer up on this thread - I've honestly always just gone along with whatever text our children's school throws at them for math classes, but I had to lol about the ADHD comment, Val, because my older dd's school has a new math curriculum… not EM but of the "spiraling" variety… and Oh Good Grief.. that is the very first thing when I saw the new mathbook - it looks like the book has ADHD!

Actually, it looks like it was authored by the folks who publish the "Yoga/Car Maintenance/Everything-under-the-Sun for Dummies" genre. It's filled with outlined boxes of random methodologies, little hints flying in from the side, crazy fonts of all different sizes and shapes, none of the chapters are more than two small topics long, then the next chapter is about something else entirely unrelated to the previous chapter, and they purposely throw in at least one problem that has nothing to do with the current chapter in each end-of-topic set of questions… just to be sure the material is "reinforced" and the kids don't forget something they might have learned three chapters ago. I got a headache just looking at it, and I can't even imagine how my dd (who has both vision issues and a challenge with staying focused in the presence of the smallest of distractions) can even begin to not want to just toss the book off a cliff smile

Thanks for allowing me to have my little rant over my dd's totally silly math book smile

polarbear
A few years back I complained because the "planner" our school was asking our children to buy was like this. It was crazy, they want to teach our kids to USE the planner but it's impossible to find the page you want. And the page is so busy it's hard to figure out where to write, and then you only get a tiny amount of space. The thing was 3X bigger than it needs to be. It had all this extraneous stuff about schools and even ads. So the kids they are most desperate to get to use it can't even function with it because it's simply too busy.

Thankfully someone listened because the planner this year is a lot smaller and more streamlines.