Hi everyone,
Some odd things have been happening with DD6's math lately. I've been afterschooling her a bit, and her teacher has reported that she's having trouble with some of the concepts. After spending some time looking over the math curriculum, I wonder if the problem is the curriculum and not the child. Thoughts welcome!
For example, I "taught" DD how to add with regrouping a while back. I put that word in quotes because I was partway into the explanation when she said, "I get it! I get it!" and intuited most of the rest. A few minutes later, the lesson was done and she had it down pat. We've practiced from time to time without problems.
Then, last week, her teacher reported that she was having trouble with it. ????? She gave me a workbook page full of problems that looked like this :
__
|__||
____|____
4 | 8
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+ 3 | 5
_________
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My daughter said she didn't get what she was meant to do with "all those lines and boxes." I can see that.
I looked at some of the other exercises, and they're all mixes and mashes of manipulatives, lines, pictures, grids, and so forth. Some of methods are downright confusing. Yet the concepts are so simple. I was struck by how her book (and others I checked) turn simple ideas into complex messes. Teaching the same concept in six or seven different ways seems unnecessarily involved when all the kids really need is a bucket of Cuisenaire rods.
I'm now seeing a lot of this stuff as wasted time spent "teaching" the same thing over and over in confusing ways. And the worst part is that the connections must seem so obvious to the adults, that I suspect that many don't conceive of why kids might not get that the boxes, cubes, lines, pictures, grids, digits, and manipulatives all stand for the same thing. What happened to simplicity? Arithmetic is SIMPLE and INTUITIVE!!!
Val
