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I had a look at Ten Marks' website and saw that it's a for-profit company with lots of slick marketing (Powerful insights from performance[/i], whatever that means). Content-free text is never a good sign. Ten Marks appears to rely on multiple choice questions. I have a low opinion of multiple choice systems, primarily because they're binary: either you're completely right or completely wrong. These systems divorce the thinking process from the answer, and so a teacher doesn't have an opportunity to see patterns in a student's mistakes (e.g., consistently tripping up on the distributive property or having trouble with regrouping in subtraction). This puts the student at risk of being cheated out of necessary instruction.




This is exactly the kind of thing that a good teacher (who could be a parent) will think about. "Hmm. Let's look at this. How did you arrive at your answer? Let's see if we can figure out where you went wrong and then you can try again." IMO, this is a critically important part of teaching.



Well, the only reason she doesn't see the difference between 6x3 and 3x6 is because there isn't one. But apart from that... er, well...hmm. Seriously, over the last couple of years, I've begun to realize that a lot of people who teach and produce textbooks have trouble with the commutative property. My DD's math teacher marked her wrong last year for writing [i]9+m for "the sum of m and 9" (the m was supposed to go first!). This was a consistent thing with this woman. I've also seen it this year in DD's textbook and in work assigned to her brother, and have heard the complaint enough times here to decide that there's a lack of understanding out there.

I call this stuff "the thousand cuts." What I mean is this: say you cut yourself once. It's no big deal if you pay a bit of attention to the wound (wash it, use a Band-Aid, keep an eye on it for a day or two). But if you cut yourself several times a day, every day, you won't be able to keep up with all the wounds and you'll be at high risk for infection or worse.

Bad education is just like the thousand cuts. On its own, the 6x3 vs. 3x6 thing is no big deal and is easily explained. But when these kinds of mistakes and confusions happen constantly, it's impossible to deal with them in a meaningful way. Our school system cuts kids every day with bad textbooks, teachers who don't understand the material they teach, fads like whole-language learning and reform (e.g. Everyday) mathematics, and so on. We're way too susceptible to slick make-a-buck "learning" systems like Ten Marks that promise Easy to Assign work. 5 clicks. Just takes seconds. Garbage in, garbage out, right?



Because we've tied the wrong things to test results. Tests should be tools that tell teachers what a student has and hasn't mastered. Instead, they've become drivers of industrial edumacation metrics and are used to measure teacher, school, and statewide education performance. The students are merely cogs turning in the school machine. This is important: the kids aren't the widgets being produced. The widgets are the test results.


Phew. Something that makes EM look good is a bad sign indeed.