If this was posted previously I apologize.

Why our kids hate math

Quote from comments.

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thanks.

I don't really think it's our kids.

Probably not our kids. But they are saying the reason for getting everyone to take algebra earlier is that some kids were ready and wanted to do it. Therefore if they decide it is a failure they will decide no-one can do things early as they have proven kids that age aren't ready.

It doesn't apply here as we have a different system.

I agree that a solid foundation is needed in earlier courses.

However I strongly disagree that standards in the USA are aiming too high. In fact, the opposite is very much the case. Standards are too low. (There may be some places in the USA that aim too high, but they are the exception.)

Also, there has to be an acknowledgement that there is a wide range of abilities.

The standards thing isn't an either-or problem --- it's both. Some kids are forced into classes they aren't ready for because of romantic ideas about sending everyone to college. At the same time, highly capable students are held back for arbitrary reasons. All of the flawed thinking leading to these approaches comes from the same well of ignorance.

What's the solution look like?

I've gone back and forth in my head between some variation of tracking or mastery-based learning.

I have heard that even a very good public school district is a year behind Germany (German parents reporting that). My kids are too young for me to be able to confirm or deny that. BUT when I went to college, both of my American roommates had to retake (and struggled with) high-school level Algebra, while I placed into multivariate calculus. In the more advanced math classes I took, there were no native English speakers - only foreign students and recent immigrants. While this was many years ago, I should mention that failing exams and having to repeat years of education was very common in my homecountry at the time(only 1/3 of my 5th grade class completed high school on time).

Solution has to be multi-factorial since so is the problem, much as I love Val's observation and think it is spot-on:


(FRAME-WORTHY.)

Anyway. The solution is to teach math BETTER to begin with-- and the only way to do that is for K-8 teachers to understand the numeracy skills that they are trying to teach. Not "know" (as in "memorize") but UNDERSTAND the underlying principles. (Which, to be blunt, many of them currently DO NOT.)

So that is the first thing.

The second aspect of that is to junk curricula that are pure garbage-- like EDM and its ilk. Curricula that are mathematically SOLID probably ought not be written by educators, but by people who are actually mathematicians themselves... teaming with educators that understand child development well.

Okay, so that is how to improve teaching-- unfortunately, CCSS did the former, but then turned over the latter without actually making sure that the people writing the daily curriculum offerings understood what those things actually meant. {tears at hair} It's not that we don't know what this kind of "what kids need to understand in order to gain fluent numeracy" looks like in reality-- subject expert mathematicians HAVE told us. It's just that the educators and particularly the publishing industry... isn't LISTENING. Or if they are, they are listening the way that my dog might if I tried to explain, say... one to one correspondence to him, or the significance of negative values. He can hear the words as sounds, but not meaning. While I realize this sounds mean-spirited, it's about the only explanation I have, short of rabid conspiracy theory, for what has come of the very reasonable and rational standards in CCSS, as opposed to what I'm seeing in classroom materials and pedagogy.

All right. So without fixing K-8 teaching and curriculum, I think that there IS no fixing this problem.

Currently, students on one end of the ability curve are shortchanged because things are far too over-simplified, watered down, sprinkled thinly, and not rigorous enough... and on the other end, we've mashed concepts into a puree that we can spoon feed everyone... only, because it's been pureed without any intentional plan (well, seemingly so) it leaves them so malnourished cognitively that they are incapable of being functionally numerate when they reach secondary math topics. If I had a nickel every time my DD saw a student in HIGH SCHOOL GEOMETRY OR ALGEBRA who did not actually understand fractions, I think she could have a tidy sum-- probably enough to purchase textbooks for college this next term. Those are kids who have been deemed "adequate" in their understanding of K through 8 mathematics. Holy mother of turtles, but there is something VERY wrong when not knowing how to write an equivalent fraction is still "okay" at an 8th grade level. No wonder they can't understand geometry. They don't have any CHANCE of understanding it-- their foundation is like wet cardboard.

So I vote for mastery-based learning, which in practice probably most resembles tracking with in-class differentiation-- but all of that only AFTER a complete curriculum and pedagogy overhaul in K through 8-- and that must be directed by actual mathematicians, not by those who are edumacators playing at math teaching.

Rather than standards that get twisted and warped by people who are ignorant of the larger math concepts that they are distorting out of recognition, there needs to be a more iterative process in developing math teaching at those lower grades-- that is:

1. Standards come from math experts
2. Teaching/child development experts assign what they feel is appropriate timing and methodology for teaching those standards,
3. classroom teachers provide input into what they know works in classrooms with live students,
4. math experts tell them what they have gotten wrong (which will ultimately come around to bite students later), and
5. repeat points 2, 3, and 4 until the math experts give it a passing grade.


Clearly, elementary educators, administrators, and elementary teaching colleges are NOT going to be pleased by my plan, since it kind of points out that they actually need both hands and someone else to hold the flashlight, but anyway, it's what I think.

I also think that this problem exists to a lesser extent in all STEM subjects-- the number of children who graduate from high school without being able to actually explain what a hypothesis is in their own words, or to simply state purpose is served by a "negative control" in an experiment? It is astonishing. These are kids who have taken AP coursework. It's the teaching-- the kids aren't STUPID, they just have been taught stuff that is profoundly ignorant, and they've been taught from day one that STEM is about memorizing, not understanding.

Exactly. The solution is to group students in separate classes by ability, and teach to their level.

Also standards have a place in quantifying what students have learnt, but they should never be used to dictate what every student should know at a particular age or grade. The reality that there is a huge range in learning ability needs to be built into the standards so that equal challenge and unequal outcomes are the expectation.

And don't forget item #0: replace almost all of the existing elementary math teachers with people who are not afraid of math.

One of my dark secrets is that I spent one term in an elementary ed (MAT) program, in which 28 out of the carefully-selected cohort of 30 graduate students openly admitted to being math-phobic. The exceptions: myself, and a second-career individual coming from an entrepreneurial background. Aagh! And there's the answer to the question of poor math achievement in NA.

While this problem does not affect our children, the classroom setting does. By having students in their classroom that hate math, they are not getting a good classroom experience.

Fortunately, our children take the class early (not in 8th or high school).

This was the point I was considering adding to this conversation. Most of our early elementary teachers are afraid of math and do a terrible time teaching the subject.

Yeah-- and I realize that isn't terribly PC to mention, but the problem IS at the teaching and classroom level as well as at a curricular/structural one.

Maybe if elementary educators were less phobic about STEM themselves, they'd be a bit less threatened by children who are obviously highly capable and interested in those subjects, too.

BUT by High School the students in my High School are tracked and there is something like 9 different levels a regular (not in special ed) sophomore at the local high school can take. I've been pleased to see that the school now had a two year algebra class. Before that was an option students were being forcing into Algebra since it was required, many of those kids would fail because it was going to fast for them. Now at my school there are one or two kids who take Calculus as freshman, and there is a class for kids not even ready for Algebra.

It still doesn't fix the fact that by that time, those students are still starting with 8 years' worth of hash for a math foundation.

The pace at the high school level would still need to be differentiated, granted-- but the real issue is that NO amount of slowing the pace can compensate adequately for not having learned basic number sense in 1st through 4th grade. The mathy kids are fine-- they just need better opportunities to go further, faster. The problematic side of things is actually on the other end of the distribution-- mostly.

There are those kids who COULD be competent if they'd had reasonably good instruction, but aren't because they have not. My DD is a kid who could have been one of those, probably-- except that we intervened early and often when we saw it happening.

That is true and there is very LITTLE math differentiation until 4th grade when GATE kicks in, and all kids are tracked by 7th. But in elementary all the students of the same grade are expected to work in the same book at approximately the same speed. Really discourages those who miss something at the beginning and really frustrates the gifted math students.

This is why DD11 is taking Algebra I at her school in the fall... and attending a math tutoring center that has her working on division. In 3rd grade she had a nightmare experience with math (extreme pressure, public shaming, bullying) with a teacher who had no experience teaching math and no interest in hearing our input. She has such a block about it that it's only because of her LOG that she's managed to compensate and keep doing well in the higher classes. But it's getting progressively harder and slower for her because she gets stuck on the basic stuff. The tutoring center is doing a dual job of teaching her the skills she needs to know and nurturing her through a kind of numeracy PTSD.

Now for her it's less of an issue. After all, the only reason she's pushing to take Algebra this year (as opposed to, say, repeating pre-Algebra) is because she's adamant about needing it to meet her goals. But for kids who have had years of bad math curriculum (with potentially some bad teaching thrown in) hitting Algebra in 9th grade would be ROUGH.

For DD algebra concepts come easy and if she can use a calculator she's good (if a little lacking in confidence). But something about memorizing her multiplication and division triggers near panic. I hope that continued exposure on the side will help it come together for her.

And then there are the stealth kids, which I'm starting to realize my kid is one of. (What's the equivalent of stealth dyslexia, stealth innumeracy?)

For those following our summer math adventures, we started where school left off, doing 2nd grade math. Then I realized that struggling with her math facts was making 2-digit stuff unneccessarily hard, so we started memorizing addition with TimezAttack.

And THEN, just a couple of days ago, I tried her on DreamBox again just for a lark, and it's kind of amazing what it's revealing to me. It has her working on 1st and even K stuff, and it's like watching these little explosions go off in her brain. She says things like, "Now I know what eighteen LOOKS LIKE!" She's getting it for the first time WHY, for example, 9 + 2 = 11. It's not just a weird combination you memorize, or an answer you arrive at by doing a rote algorithm with your fingers. There's an actual REASON for it, that you can VISUALIZE.

So here's my kid, with her wacky visuo-spatial sense, heading into 2nd grade math with an entire year grade-skip because she's been compensating with her freakishly large verbal working memory.

I've completely revised our goals for the summer -- if we do nothing else besides DreamBox through 1st grade, and learn some math facts, so that she's not starting 2nd grade math on "wet cardboard," I shall be very well pleased.

Stealth dyscalculia. Though I find that they usually have working memory or visual-spatial issues. Sounds like your kid was never given a good foundation in number sense. It's one of the things I like about Singapore Math.

I think she does have visual-spatial issues. She was "given" a good foundation in number sense (excellent use of manipulatives etc. at school, and doing all of Dreambox 1st grade at home last year) -- it just didn't "take." And nobody knew.

I agree with the article regarding numeracy and basic math foundation-- at least for my seven year old. It has been key to his enjoyment and facility with math- just understanding calculation and quantity.
When we moved him to an early-grade Montessori school, I thought the materials might be tortuous because he was working so comfortably with equations. It's been an unfounded worry- he loved the materials because they visually show him the number relationships. In fact, his mental calculation skills are much faster after working for 1/2 year on materials.
For DS, excellent math skills have been a combination of strong numeracy foundation, practice, and because of his "giftedness" providing higher level, interesting concepts at home (patterns, perfect numbers, interesting number sequences).
I was a victim of poor teachers, spotty math foundation, and no one explaining the effort it might take to excel in math (I was a "natural" at reading/language arts, so assumed I wasn't "good" at math because I had to work harder).