ANd yes, people complain SM doesn't have enough review built it but that's what the IP,EP,CWP books are for. For the ones I've seen, it appears it's that the curriculum wasn't used as intended and that's why it failed. It's not a failure of the curriculum. I LOVE SM and have a lot invested in the books, CWP etc.
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The comment I read often is that SM is soooo cheap and RS is sooo expensive. Then you read about the problems. Well, by the time you add in the HIGs, CWP, EP etc the price is only about $10 cheaper than RS.
Do parents of gt kids complain that SM doesn't have enough reviews built in or are those parents of ND kids? I personally find it to have way too many exercises and reviews and we skip lots of them. The only thing we do rigorously are all challenging problems in CWP. We skip most of the other ones. We use only regular workbooks and CWP. I have two instructor guides but I didn't use them. I do own textbooks because the notation is somewhat different from what I was taught as a child.
As Kriston said some of the concepts do repeat and gt kid probably doesn't see any difference between counting up to 10,000 and counting up to 100, 000 but you simply ignore such chapters. At one point DS6 was working on chapters from both 4A and 5A at the same time since it made sense to go one step farther and cover it at the same time. We also do chapters out of order if possible whenever we feel in mood for something else than what's next in the workbook.
