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Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,298
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Joined: Sep 2007
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I found a thoughtful essay by a guy named Barry Garelick. He does a good job of dissecting the flaws in spiral mathematics, using Everyday Math's approach. “The Everyday Mathematics curriculum incorporates the belief that people rarely learn new concepts or skills the first time they experience them, but fully understand them only after repeated exposures. Students in the program study important concepts over consecutive years; each grade level builds on and extends conceptual understanding.”
This does in fact make sense considering that for most people a particular concept or task starts to make more sense after they have moved on to the next level. But this phenomenon occurs when there is mastery at each previous level. ... Each previous bit of learning seems that much more apparent at the next level of understanding. In EM, however, students are exposed to topics repeatedly, but mastery does not necessarily occur. Topics jump around from day to day. ...
A casual glance at Everyday Math’s workbook pages does not reveal that there is anything amiss. The problems seem reasonable, and in some cases they are exactly the same type given in Singapore Math. What the casual observer doesn’t know is what sequencing has preceded that particular lesson...
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Joined: Mar 2013
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A nicely written piece that tackles the job of describing the anguish felt by many with pathos.
Makes me so glad that a Russian colleague turned me on to SM 4 years ago!
Every time I see the term 'spiral' with Maths education I mentally picture the penny rolling around in those science museum black hole models LOL
Last edited by madeinuk; 03/05/14 05:32 AM.
Become what you are
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Joined: Aug 2010
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My friend whose older child went all the way through Everyday Math at DD's former school reports that her child needed math tutoring when he moved to middle school. He still did not have his multiplication and division facts down, for one...
(EDM is not the standard text in my district, but was used at DD's former charter.)
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Joined: Feb 2011
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Every time I see the term 'spiral' with Maths education I mentally picture the penny rolling around in those science museum black hole models LOL Oh, man--- I am so glad it isn't just me. I develop this involuntary SMIRK/SNEER when I "EnVision" it, too.  Many teachers do not realize that they have been given an unenviable and impossible task. In fact, I have spoken with new teachers who speak of EM and other poorly conceived programs in glowing terms, speaking of them as leading to “deeper understandings of math.” Some have said “I never understood math until I had this program.” But it is their adult insight and experience that is talking and creating the illusion that the math is deep. Children cannot make the connections the adults are making who already have the experience and knowledge of mathematics. I've bemoaned EXACTLY this thing-- it's not really reasonable to expect autodidactism from students who have no foundation (yet) to even tie things to.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.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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But it is their adult insight and experience that is talking and creating the illusion that the math is deep. Children cannot make the connections the adults are making who already have the experience and knowledge of mathematics. I've bemoaned EXACTLY this thing-- it's not really reasonable to expect autodidactism from students who have no foundation (yet) to even tie things to.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. So Everyday Math is the equivalent of Whole Word Reading. The concept of that being that adults read whole words without sounding them out, therefore phonics is unnecessary.
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Joined: Sep 2007
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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."
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Joined: Dec 2012
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We have always had spiral integrated maths BUT from what I can remember you did a whole chapter on each topic drop start to finish each year - you didn't jump round and it was the 70's so while it was "new maths" the formatting was fairly traditional.
Ds6 on the other hand is learning to carry out a statistical investigation. Why? He is supposedly fully challenged by this and his basic maths facts homework. But statistics is maths for people whose skills are not in maths and really requires more life experience. Why can they not learn the four operations, fractions and decimals first then move on to such topics? And they don't write anything down so a lot of the stuff they do tests their working memory more than their maths. Ds has a ludicrously high working memory to be fair but what about everyone else who could do it quite fine with manipulatives or on paper but not while staring at the wall?
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Joined: Jun 2009
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My dd is in an Algebra II class where they just started the unit on long division of polynomials. She was surprised by the number of kids in the class who didn't know how to do regular long division.
This class is comprised mostly of 9th & 10th graders who were in 3rd & 4th grade when our district implemented the Everyday Math curriculum. Not to jump to conclusions, of course...
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