I will not write much but I have to put in my 2 cents because my child has been truly affected by this program along with the older "guinea pigs" who are now in 8th grade. My son is in 4th grade and has had the worst year in math that I have ever seen. He is a math guy and I have never seen him be so bored and struggle at the same time with EM concepts. Last year he was lucky enough to have a teacher to give him accelerated homework to make up for the boredom in the classroom. However, this year his math teacher says he is spacey, lazy, sulky and makes many mistakes - thus "he must not know how to do the work in the first place so why should I give him harder work". Along with the idea of learning a concept, moving on and then coming back to the previous concept to tie it all together they must explain EVERYTHING in written language and if this is not done they are penalized on tests. He has been doing horribly on tests and it is creating problems between he and I and also his teacher and I. Another concept of this program is that children who are at higher levels will be able to serve as role models to the other students and will help bring those other students up. This is explained under the companies explanation of Connected Math (which is used in middle school to help connect children who used EM to the transition into high school). And there have been many negative stories because the philosophy of EM does not match up with high school math. At this moment our middle school in NJ is on the watch list for math after taking the NJASKs(our state test) and many feel it is because of the connected math. My son has always been so bright in math and numbers have come so easily to him and it is just fading away into this slow process which kills me. I am actually going to be sending him to a private school for 3 weeks this summer which teaches a traditional math class and will assess him and teach to his level. The woman who runs it also had a daughter who went through EM and said she would never have her do it again. When my son gets assessed I will not be surprised to see that he has fallen behind the other bright children who have been learning traditional math. I am not saying it is all bad but especially if you have a child who just gets it and has a wonderful natural ability it may not be where you want to be. But this is completely my opinion. I'm just waiting for this year to be over so we can start anew and maybe advocate for something different
. Good luck with your endeavor.
Jules
