Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Lost it with "Everyday Math" Book

When DS6 came home with HW to "count the dots" again.
I threw book in disgust , this piece of garbage math book.
I then pieced it back together and told my DS "finish this book" and I will buy you a $100 lego.
He flew threw the book , did 115 pages in 1 and 1/2 hours.
I then put book in envelope with note telling Teacher this book is too easy for him he needs harder work.

I have been telling her this and getting nowhere so now lets see what she says after he practically finished the book meant for the year in under 2 hrs.

I'll be interested to see if that approach works! Keep us posted! What fun - a new LEGO kit! My boys are salivating already for a new kit with Christmas approaching fast.

Dazey

ROFL - I love it! You'll have to post back if this approach works with the teacher.

Hope your DS enjoys those new legos! :-)

LOL Everybody, thanks for all the laughs at least.
And yes he is in a "gifted" class! That is the funniest part of all.

My DH emailed the princpal and told her we have a mensa child who is counting dots and we need to meet with her LOL!!!

We will see what happens.

By the way Kimck, he woke up at 5am hoping he could do them b4 school!

LOL, we are using everyday math as well with DS5. Thankfully the teacher just sends worksheets home instead of a whole book or else I would be quite overhwhelmed with the simplicity. She says that I can differentiate and make it more challenging...but I am hoping that they will do that as I have sent them math workbooks and printouts, etc. I just don't have the creativity to make an assignment 3-4 grade levels higher. They are trying, but when I see papers that come home that say "write the number that comes next: 10, 17, 13" That is a little much for me. We also had ones where we cut out numbers that we see in magazines and glue them to the paper. Last night he wrote his answers in roman numerals to make it a little more interesting. She did decide to give him his own spelling words now, which is great. We went from sat to furniture..so that is an improvement. Baby steps.

Oh my gosh....Too funny!!! I just had a little breakdown last night when my 4th grader had to do "partial sums adding" for his homework. He just finished 30 minutes of algebra in Stanford's EPGY program and then had to resort to doing "everyday math" adding....His teacher freaks if every little step isn't written down....It took the kid over an hour just to finish what would normally take him 5 minutes because he just didn't want to do it, and I'm yelling at him saying "Just do it!!!" "Why? Because you just have to!!!" Ugh.... Needless to say, it wasn't a very fun night at our house last night haha....

When my DS started school, he knew how to multiply. After learning to multiply the "everyday msth" way he no longer could.
They teach a thing called latticing and partial products. It is quite frankly RETARDED!

I have the same issue with Wolf's math book. Since I get to pick and choose out of it we get to skip all the make it harder than it has to be junk. I'm not surprised a lot of kids don't like math if this is how it is taught!!!

I also lost it on Everyday Math last week! It's actually Houghton Mifflin but they're using much the same approach. DS who is in 1st grade and should be doing 3rd grade math, was doing "regroup the tens" You have 56. How else can you regroup the tens? You're supposed to write 4 tens and 16 ones or 3 tens and 26 ones. He just kept saying "WHY? WHY 26 ones? That makes no sense!"

Then "Draw a picture to describe how you solved the problem."

Ugh...

LOL, that is so annoying. And you gotta love the pictures too, you have to show your work. What is sad to me too is your DS's work seems actually more challenging than my DS's first grade assignments about what number comes next, and they are all numbers under 20. What number comes next in first grade?Really?

Can I just add my "ugh" to the chorus?

That curriculum is beyond ridiculous.

I'd better stop with that before I roll on for three pages.

UGH.

Well that's actually the 2nd grade work... his teacher is giving him 2nd grade homework, but he still has to do the 1st grade work in class. But according to his achievement testing, as well as his "grade level exam" he should be about halfway through 3rd grade.

She's ensuring there are no gaps. Because adding 2+2 is somehow likely to have a gap, even when you can add 3596+4989. I've given up temporarily because he's receiving full differentiation for reading... got to pick my battles!

Let us know how this goes. Our 3rd grader has to keep her EM book at home this year. I almost, almost had her finish the entire book last week and take it in. I've been keeping it out hoping she will just do it herself one day, but instead she chooses to do algebra.

Wow...that's scary that 2nd grade work is that simple as well. I don't know what level DS5 is at with math...maybe they will finish assessing him at some point. I would guess some things he is 3rd and some things 5th or above. It really depends. tonight's EM homework was "start a one and see how high you can count" My DS looks at me and says "I could count into the millions...I don't want to do that." so then he just wrote down 60 on the line, LOL. They also had to fill in missing numbers in the number grid from 1-10. I know that is first grade work...but I thought kids were supposed to all have differentiation. It's just frustrating. Mine does have differentiation for spelling...not so sure about reading. He told me that he met with the reading lady and that he was "done with reading" and that he doesn't need to see her for anything any more because he got the highest scores possible on her test. Hopefully they will do something for that.

Ahh...Everyday Math. It was the bane of DS9's existence when he was in 2nd grade. He wanted to do fractions and algebra, EM wanted him to cut out pictures of triangles and write about our past presidents. I have memories of writing "This is not mathematics!" on his homework sheets.

Sometimes on the way home from school, we'd get on the topic of EM and he'd exclaim, "What's the deal with this number grid* ?!? Why can't we just ADD????!!!?? It's so much easier!!"

Val

*The thing where they write 1-100 in a calendar-like format. This is supposed to teach number sense or something. They omitted zero and put each new ten on an old line:


11 ...18 19 20
21

I thought this was particularly confusing. Kids learned "number sense" by moving their fingers along the grid. I wrote a letter to the school's Curriculum-Meister pointing out the many flaws in this approach and how it could be mucho confusing. She told me that she had a hard time understanding what I wrote, but that EM was a good system and they were keeping it. Oh well.

DS had an EM homework sheet yesterday (3rd grade) which had a box labeled "Total" with two smaller boxes under it labeled "Part" and "Part". There was a word problem in which he needed to add 35 and 20. He had filled in the boxes correctly but wasn't sure what to write on the line below which asked, "Why does your answer make sense?"

Finally, he wrote, "Because I added perfectly."

That answer is perfect. Love it!!

Val

I am glad I am not the only one who thinks EM is retarded. It really is garbage.

At the risk of offending (which is not my intention), I would like to make a gentle suggestion that we use a word other than "retarded". This has come up in more than one post now and while I'm sure that no one here is intending to denigrate people with disabilities, calling something retarded implicitly carries the idea that people with cognitive disabilities are somehow..."less". Although I realize that it has not been used here in that way, it is a word that is still closely associated with its original meaning.

On a more topical note, while I'm neither a fan of EM nor of the lattice method, partial products is nothing more than a paper representation of steps many people take when they solve multiplication problems mentally. I would argue that it not only simplifies many multiplication problems, but also validates the way in which many strong math students flexibly use number understanding to solve those problems.

DH and I were just talking about this over the weekend, when DS showed DH how to do the lattice method - which provided us all a good laugh as DH tried to make sense of that one . I agree about the partial products method being something that is commonly used as a simple breakdown method.

Thank you, Taminy. I love the way you expressed this. Recently, that adjective was used in another post, and I was trying to figure out a tactful way to post the same suggestion.

At the risk of being VERY unpopular, I actually like EM. It is probably very frustrating for hard-core left-brainies because of the need to not "just get on with it" but works marvelously with more intuitive kids.If it's done properly there should be pre-tests for the year and for the unit so that DCs can test out of info they know. Also, does the school know that he's doing epgy algebra? I would hit them over the head with that -- and maybe set him up in the classroom working individually.

I have mixed feelings about EM. The "elliptical learning" works about as well as "spiral software development" (unevenly). But H-M math does the same thing so changing books is no panacea.

My daughter and I also found the EM supplemental games (for early elementary students) boring and repetitive. We liked the Montessori math manipulatives better. We are both visual learners.

I like the way EM introduces deep mathematical concepts to kids at such an early age. But, many elementary school teachers and parents don't get the point of many of the EM exercises. One teacher at my daughter's school says that the district gave up on EM because so many of the teachers "don't get it".

It's too bad, because
"I took a poll at lunchtime at work the other day. 100% of parents of school-aged children who also hold PhDs in science prefer the Everyday Math curriculum.* For inexplicable reasons, our own neighborhood school, and the entire school district, had stopped using EM despite more than respectable standardized test scores and teachers who loved the teaching method. Perhaps EM pushed some parents out of their math comfort zone (read The Math Moron)?"
Read the entire post:
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2006/11/who-is-keeping-score-and-why.html

Anyway, I am not a math educator or a home-schooling mom. I managed to earn a BA in pure math and a PhD in theoretical physics, but that doesn't make me an expert at raising kids. YMMV.

FWIW, my daughter enjoys the math puzzles in the "Penrose the Mathematical Cat" series. They really are engaging stories with interesting math puzzles. She read them in K, and is still re-reading them today (at age 8/5th grade). She is now able to solve more of the puzzles than she could 3 years ago.

I was just griping about partial quotients last night. I get all the other 'partials' and can do them....I may not necessarily like those methods, but I can do them. However, I just can NOT get partial quotients.

Thank goodness DS gets it well enough to do it for his homework, because I just can't make any sense of it. I got so confused last night, that I just got out the calculator to double check his work (out of his sight) because I couldn't even get back on track to do it the traditional way, . And I usually do math in my head....

I have a PhD in the sciences (biology) and I don't like EM at all. I'm surprised at the result of your poll, given that the people who lead the charge against the reform mathematics movement (EM is part of this movement) are typically scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. See Mathematically Correct for examples.

I don't like the fact that EM has too many questions with no right answer. For example, when kids learn to measure, they cut out a paper ruler and part of their homework involves measuring things at home. The teacher has no way of knowing if the child did the task correctly or not unless the kids bring in the stuff from home for the teacher to re-measure (highly unlikely). EM is replete with exercises like this one.

Val

Hmm...the use of the word didn't bother me. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with policing expressions that people use.

Val

Now see. That's why I love EM -- no right answers but divergent thinking.

Outcome DON'T DO IT!! Don't finish that book LOL well unless you want your child to be HATED for going against the system !
BAD BAD BAD. So BAD We have to remove him from the school!
Teacher hates him now. How dare he go ahead!

yikes. Not good. I don't get why sometimes teachers take things so personally. She should be amazed and appreciate the fact that he went through all that which certainly wasn't fun for him doing work that was probably quite simplistic. Sorry : (

Yep that is exactly it , she took it soooo personal. My intent was not to insult her. I just didn't know how else to get the point across. But man was she insulted! WHOA!

So now she has lost probably her only mensa student but I think she will be happy to get back to "routine"

Val, did you read the entire post?

At the end, I wrote:
"* sample size n = 2. Be wary of statistics; they can be very misleading. ;-)"

When I took upper division math courses, we sometimes had to get up and show our proofs to the class. Then the professor would ask open-ended questions like, "Why do you think your answer is correct?" So I take no offense to Q like that on my kid's homework.

Math is open-ended. Arithmetic is not. There is a big difference. Some people can't believe I was a math major, because I don't particularly excel at arithmetic. Neither does my kid.

The EM developers are trying to build math intuition. It may not be an effective approach for some kids (or teachers or parents), but I was impressed by the curriculum I saw. My kid is very intuitive.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2006/11/math-intuition.html

Has anyone tried to homeschool algebra? I tried:
http://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Al...mp;s=books&qid=1256254234&sr=8-1

She has to do every problem in section 1, every other in section 2 and discuss how she would develop a solution for section 4. If she misses too many of the Q on section 2, I make her do the ones in section 3, which duplicate the practice problems of section 2. It's a very good book, but both mommy and kid don't have the discipline to do it regularly after a day of work and long division.

I have to say, for me it is less of EM being a problem and more of the level of math work not being appropriate.

I love partial quotients as I understand them--much easier and more efficient than long division. I don't use EM though, so I'm not entirely sure that it means the same thing within that curriculum. I always think of partial quotients as just using the easiest multiplication chunks to solve the problem. I like it because it doesn't obscure the place value and it lets me pull out the "easy" parts first. For instance, with a problem like 5,468 divided by 4:

rather than go through it in a long series of steps, I can look at what's obvious to me based on what I know about 400, 60 and 8: 1,117 x 4 is 4,468 and then know I still have 1,000 left to divide (250)for a grand total of 1,367.

However, I have to say that I was a long division disaster--so many sequential steps, so little patience on my part....

LOL...long division doesn't bother me too much. And actually, it seems that DS has taken to it pretty well (for a method that has to be shown on paper). But those partial quotients are just crazy for us. I had to sit here for a minute and actually think about how I do division in my head and it goes something like long division, but I 'see' it, if that makes any sense. I just can't 'see' the partial-quotient method.

I don't know why that particular one stumps me, but it does. Maybe it's because the setup is the same as long division or at least that's how DS has shown me. Of course, if DS has it wrong, that could explain a lot . Thank goodness the teacher lets the kids use their "best method" on tests.

GS10's school uses Math Investigations. It uses something like that 'partial quotients' but GS10 called it something else. It is slooooowwwwwww. His math teacher has added in Sikore math sheets for practicing adding/subtracting/dividing/multiplying. GS10 was resisting it because of the dividing. I saw what he was doing and then showed him long division the way I learned. All of a sudden he was flying through the sheet. His teacher saw what he was doing and said as long as he understood what he was doing, it was OK. She also said, "I guess your grandma showed you that, too."

I was curious about the partial product and partial quotient methods so I watched a few videos explaining the methods. The partial product method looked like the method my son learned for doing double digit multiplication mentally. The partial quotient method looked like too much writing. My 11 year old son would much rather do mental math anywhere he can because he has motor dyspraxia and writing of any kind slows him down. He likes to use his own partial mental math method when he does math of any kind.

I had to let him figure out how to compensate for his dysgraphia when we tried everything that other people suggested for the lining up columns in multi-digit multiplication and division. He didn't like using graph paper. It seems to work best for him to figure it out how to compensate for the writing disability on his own. For him, Life of Fred and mental math books are working well.

My daughter, who is very capable in math but is NOT advanced, is also bored with the EM curriculum. Why? Because when she *does* get something, she still has to do it with very little variation again, and again, and again, and again.... Not just this year, but next year, and the next.

A friend of mine is an education consultant tasked with supporting EM in a nearby district. I once asked her what there is to love about EM. (I want to believe it's a good program, truly.) She told me that many kids will fail at math because they can't cope with rote memorization and drills, and EM offers another way. I didn't say anything, but I can't help but thinking that having to write out 20 seven-digit numbers using words for homework is its own kind of pain, too, especially when you've been doing it for a couple of weeks at school, and you did it quite capably the year before too. Knowing how to read numbers is essential, but writing them out longhand is tedious and unnecessary once the skill has been acquired.

It's really, really hard to convince a kid that an assignment like this is worth doing.