Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Question about algebra and radical acceleration

I was always shocked by how many of my Big-10 college students had done no writing during their senior year of high school except one big research paper, which was returned to them with a letter grade and no comments. How is that teaching a kid anything? One semester when I asked the question, EVERY student in the class--no exceptions--raised a hand to say that this had been their experience.

Appalling!

True. No kids--GT or no--learn well in a "drill and kill" situation for the majority of their time.

(Some skills--like math facts--can be learned well this way, but anything beyond rote memorization, no. And the "drill and kill" for math facts is used short-term, in quick bursts, not as a long-range, consistent teaching method.)

I was looking at a fifth grade teacher's web site in a local schol district. It said that four days per week, her students do 100 multiplication problems as soon as math class starts. The goal is to get them done with 100% accuarcy in less than one minute during the course of the school year.

Can you imagine??? In FIFTH grade? That would be dull in 3rd grade.

Talk about bored out of their little gourds, not to mention an ideal method for killing any curiosity about mathematics.

Oy.

Val

I probably have even more conservative thinking than Dottie on this subject. There have to be minimum standards, and consequences for teachers not teaching the material to meet those standards. One problem is the motivated & gifted students not being allowed to excel, but instead are held back while the slower kids need help.
I think we need to implement a non-grade approach to classroom divisions, and keep a child in Math 1, or Reading 1, etc. until the child has mastered those concepts; then move to Math 2, Reading 2, etc. There should be no passing until the material is mastered, and there should be no holding back the children who know the material.

FWIW, this was taken from a 4th grade teachers website, today. This is the teacher that GS8's teacher has recommended for him next year. I've edited it to remove students names.


This is the beginning of the final quarter for 4th grade. I'm worried all over again about what GS8 will do in 4th grade as he already knows this, as well as adding, subtracting, & multiplying fractions.

Maybe what's even more worrisome is the fact that our school has around an 80% proficient rate in math on the state proficiency tests. I don't think this is asking much of our children, if 9 year olds are still learning their multiplication tables, yet 80% of them 'pass' the state requirements.

I should have explained it better: they start off with a goal of less than five minutes and work to one minute from 0*0 to 9*9 in random order. The others presumably wait around while the rest finish.

I think my point was that this approach kills enthusiasm, and anyway, why didn't these kids learn this stuff in 3rd grade? By the time I was in 5th grade, we were way past 5*4 and 7*9. If an entire class needs to practice this exercise in 5th grade, the school has done something wrong.

I understand that the schools believe they're doing their best and that many teachers are really trying very hard. But that doesn't mean there aren't serious problems, and the educational establishment has to carry a lot of the blame. After all, they're the ones who got us into this mess, not the government. Most students in other developed countries would find our standardized tests trivial because their school systems are far more rigorous than ours.

===> And they do this with less money per student (we outspend almost every other country on the planet), more students per class, and lower or equivalent teacher pay. This information is available from OECD statistics from the PISA exam. <===

I lived in Ireland for many years, and the public schools in the poorest parts of Dublin provide the same high quality education as the ones in the ritzy parts of the city.

Ireland has two levels of courses students can take in high school: "Pass" or "Ordinary" and "Honours".

Here's a link to a YouTube video with some examples of what
they learn in ORDINARY maths. Contrast with US exit exams asking for students to calculate the interest on a bank deposit. Watch and cry.



Val

whaaaaa!

I think my problem is that all the focus on minimum standards seems to have LOWERED the age of proficiency for things like times tables. When I was in school, we knew ours by the middle of 3rd grade. And this was in a rural, not-wealthy public school.

It seems to me that the more standardized the proficiency requirements become, the lower they get. I don't like that.

BTW, my posting overlapped with Val. I'm with her.

We did this in 3rd grade too and there was no waiting for the other kids either. Actually the kids really enjoyed the competition to see who could get to the finish line first! (they had race cars that moved up as they went along)

My DS is now in 4th and some of those kids still don't know their multiplication facts down cold. I don't blame the school, the school taught the facts. I think it is up to the parents to keep the kids drilling or memorizing or whatever. And with so much other stuff to do sometimes it is hard to find the time to keep up with skills that have already been taught.

So while I agree there are definitely problems with the school system I also think that the parents have to be sure that their child is getting what he or she needs. Just my 2 cents!

I agree tables should be learned in 3rd grade, but if that's not the case I think 1-5 minute drill will not kill anybody.

As for skipping 5-8, I would probably cover all the areas he may have not covered yet before jumping to algebra. I would make sure he can add/subtract/multiply fractions, calculate %, area and volume of different shapes, rounding, angles. That's up to Singapore 6B, I don't have anything beyond that. I would also go through some challenging middle school problems (Singapore Challenge problems, Zaccaro middle school, Mathematical Olympiads for Elementary and Middle schools).

DS5 does 4th grade math, but I still feel there are lots of things to cover before he starts algebra. The good news is that he is finally getting to the level when challenging problems can require some effort. There is only that much you can do in the first few years, but you can come up with interesting problems for the middle school level.

You are all right that lots of things repeat or are very obvious and the kids don't really need to learn them, but there are still new things to learn there.