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.
