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

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.