Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Supplementing Common Core Math with Traditional

Perhaps the piece missing is that, in SM, almost all kindergarten math (and a fair amount of first grade math) is done with manipulatives and practical math stories (word problems). The description of this particular CC implementation appears to be lacking sufficient concrete practice, prior to the paper and pencil pictorial work.

SM spends two years teaching number bonds, with the term and visual introduced in K, but mainly in conjunction with manipulatives. It's only in first, after plenty of opportunities for establishing number sense with concrete practice, that the symbolic representation of number bonds is used more in a paper and pencil context.

And yes, kindergarten is the developmental range when most children are just beginning to develop conservation, so even the manipulative play may be beyond them--though it may also help them to explore conservation.

You're correct that I'm complaining about how it's explained (specific to the CC). The number bond approach seems to be used by the Common Core as a means to teaching a concept (existence of equivalent sums), rather than as an algorithm for displaying these sums, which is what it is. That's the problem.

US math education has a way of making straightforward topics unnecessarily complex. Ideas are presented out of order, concepts are mashed up together, and individual algorithms are treated as critical routes to understanding, rather than as techniques for getting an answer.

The thing is, it all looks pretty at first glance. The textbooks are colorful and friendly and have lots of nice photographs in them. If you're familiar with something from another system, you might look at one and think, "Oh, they use x [e.g. number bonds], like SM does. Great." But when you look closely, you see that they present things out of context, mix too many ideas in one go, and make such a mess, even HG+ kids feel like they can't understand math concepts that they figured out for themselves when they were 3 or 4, and start to hate it.

I'm going to compare a SM presentation of number bonds with that in a CC book. I strongly suspect that the SM book will present ideas one step at a time in a logical manner. I doubt the same will be true of the CC book. I say this because I've done this several (umpteen?) times already over the years and the result is always the same: Common Core or not, mass-use books produced by Big Ed make a mess of things.

Yes, exactly. Thank you aeh.

Yes - DD started it as a 'fun' thing to do and didn't even realize it was "Maths" for a while there. It really does the job very nicely.

I realize this may be an insanely stupid question, but help me out here, I want to be less stupid: why do US elementary schools not just use the Singapore text books? Or, if using a foreign textbook is unpalatable, why has no publisher bought the rights and adapted the books for the US market?

Tigerle,

They do have Americanized/adapted SM materials. They even have a CC edition:

http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_CC_Ed_s/252.htm
http://www.singaporemath.com/v/sf_pmcct3a.pdf

Looking at the sample pages, I have no issues with them.

ETA: I'd guess that the reason as to why these books aren't used more frequently in the classroom has a lot to do with the marketing (and perhaps lobbying) power of the big US publishing company.

Thank you mana, the political angle is really interesting.

So, the problem is not the cc standards, those are fine.
It's not that there isn't a good curriculum in existence that is aligned to those standards, there is one that is "astonishingly good".
It's not that there aren't any good textbooks available for the curriculum published in the US either, there are, and from how often I have read about home schoolers using those, they must have been around for some time.
It's not that math anxious elementary teachers can mess up the implementation, because kids can simply teach themselves following the examples in the book.

It's just that schools don't use them, possibly because of the influence or lobbying power of other textbook companies.

Who decides what curriculum/books to use? Local school boards? Do state departments of education get no say? I understand there is no federal authority. Who approves text books, is there an accreditation authority?

Actually, there is a major USA textbook publisher backing a version of SM. HMH publishes Math in Focus, which hews pretty closely to the SM method. I know several private schools, and at least two public schools, which use it. There is a network of math education professors, based in Massachusetts, who publish research and conduct trainings on it, and promote its use (both the Marshall Cavendish and HMH published versions). Both the MC and HMH versions are on the approved curriculum list for California, which pretty much makes them approved everywhere.

So there are no regulatory obstacles to schools using SM.

As I said before, some teachers find it hard to teach. Our district did a trial in four schools years ago, only one school did not have a fall in scores. Hard to believe, but it is true. So they abandoned it quickly.

In the end, our district wrote their own curriculum that borrows heavily from SM, but lacks the clarity and elegance, and adds all the reform math nonsense.

Our little private uses Go Math, which is like a poor man's version of the SM. A lot bigger, many fewer challenging word problems, but with more teacher's support. I have often wondered why they didn't simply adopt SM. I think it does go back to the fact teachers who are not strong in math find it hard,even if the gifted children and mathy adults love them.

That reminds me, I think what happened in Seattle was rather interesting:

http://kuow.org/post/surprise-move-seattle-schools-approve-singapore-math

http://www.kplu.org/post/seattle-sc...ce-new-math-textbooks-makes-its-own-pick

Some interesting comments at the end of the 2nd link.

I haven't seen either of the program but MiF seems rather expensive. I can see why cost was a concern.