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From the youngest to the High School
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Don't believe when your kid says 'Oh, I'm just not a math person' or 'I hate Math'. The problem is not with Math or your child, but with the way your child has been taught the subject. It's unbelievable how frustrated and discouraged our children get studying Math in school. I've read somewhere on the net that after the third grade 75 percent of kids like Math, but by the end of Junior High this percentage drops down to 25 (If you run across this quote please send it to me).
You can ask anybody, be that teachers, parents, administrators or kids -- nobody is happy with the current state of affairs. Everybody have their own solution or agenda to promote. The way things are now, pseudo-pedagogy supersedes education, terminology supersedes common sense, and in Math education itself trivia and memorization supersedes logic and basic understanding.
Services Provided: Each child would be given an evaluation to determine strengths and gaps in math education and appropriate course of action suggested. I can guarantee that in a month or at most two you won't recognize your children. Their confidence will go up, their grades will improve, they won't be permanently confused about their homework. They'll stop repeating this silly stuff about Math. In short, they'll stop hating Math and all related to it.
I can also help to build required skills to pass Math part of MCAS as well as SAT, SAT2, PSAT, and SSAT. I can guarantee significant improvement in scores and in general confidence level.
If your child is just bored with school Math, I'll find an appropriate level of material to challenge their abilities and their imagination, they'll learn how to see simplicity in complex and complexity in simple, to see how different branches of Math and sciences interconnected in infinite patterns.
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Singapore Math Curriculum |
American distributor of Singapore Math in Oregon.
Singapore-based store with wider selection.
An Education Week article: U.S. Schools Importing Singaporean Texts
A Math Forum article from the Boston Globe, March 4, 2001: Singapore Math in Boston Area
NPR piece on Singapore textbooks and its use in American classroom
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Russian "Peterson" Curriculum |
Publisher's page
Comparative assessment
Here you can find how American Math Education got to the current state and what are recent battles won and lost in that area.
Would like to share a peculiar Math "fact" taught in American school? Would you like to read what other parents have sent in? Look here.
Mathematically
Correct - "organization that fights the Establishment
on behalf of sanity and quality in math education"
Hung-Hsi Wu site.
Middle School Mathematics comparisons - NSF report. It's a very telling document no matter how you slice it.
Some common sense notes from Atrium School
Read Math Wars, have a blast
Some reviews on Grove Publishing site.
It's symptomatic that in their Mathematics Program Reviews give high grades, i.e. above B, to just a precious few curricula.
New Math -- universally argued about
Everyday Math
Thinking Math
Connected Math
Math Advantage
Developmental Mathematics
MathLand
Interactive Mathematics
Home schooling based curricula -- some are good, some are ...
Miquon
Saxon
Horizons Math
Calvert Math
Math-U-See Foundations
Making Math Meaningful
Traditional Curricula
Progress in Mathematics
Here is what I found on their web site
Once, while teaching seven junior high students, Steve asked how many objects they would each receive if there were fourteen pieces. The students' response was, "What do we do: add, subtract, multiply, or divide?"
None of seven junior high students knew what to do. It's telling
Check out how it compares itself with Saxon. It's very insightful and says a lot about both curricula.
Here is a quote from their site: The scale should be tipped in favor of a concrete understanding of math concepts so that he can think mathematically!
I don't get what should be favored concrete or concepts. We certainly have differing ideas on what concretely stands behind these two concepts. Somebody save me.
Both of my boys experience Everyday Math in Elementary public and in private schools. Below is what Mathematically correct says about this curriculum.
For example, a "promising" curriculum called Everyday Mathematics says calculators are "an integral part of Kindergarten Everyday Mathematics" and urges the use of calculators to teach kindergarten students how to count. There are no textbooks in this K-6 curriculum, and even if the program were otherwise sound, this is a serious shortcoming. The standard algorithm for multiplying two numbers has no more status or prominence than an Ancient Egyptian algorithm presented in one of the teacher's manuals. Students are never required to use the standard long division algorithm in this curriculum, or even the standard algorithm for multiplication.
Luckily, I can afford to stay only mildly concerned. My personal third grader works on "traditional" fifth grade level and my kindergartener is at least a year ahead.
Geometry
is the first really tough Math or science course in American school. It
demands understanding of rigorous logical constructs and proofs. That's
why a lot of kids have such a big problem with it.
There are 1000 Kumon franchises in USA.
Score!
Sylvan
1000 points of knowledge
Homeschool World board Sonlight forum Math Forum
Notin' yet
Sizeable Russian-Jewish community in Boston, Newton, Brookline and surrounds is concerned with inferiority of American Math education. Full disclosure: I'm an integral part of that community. Here are two oldest and largest schools in the area (out of at least four or five).
Russian School of Mathematics, a Boston Globe article about the school.
MCAS is a Massachusetts invention and pretty good one at that too. Here are a few helpful links.
Math framework from Department of Education site
Math worksheets ad infinitum what could be more useful and more ridiculous at the same time
Certainly people with different backgrounds would attach different meaning to such terms as depth and advanced skills. However, if a third grade kid spends hours and hours practicing addition of one digit numbers consensus should be that this activity lacks depth and does nothing to advance cognitive skills.
Automation
Basic skills
Advanced skills
Cognitive skills
Creative thinking
Depth
Breadth
There are two general American approaches to teaching Math. One is to overemphasize automation and basic skills to the detriment of depth and cognitive skills. The other "New Math" is to eschew automation and basic skills in favor of fuzzy logic and discovery process without right and wrong answers.
Oriental Japanese/Chinese/Korean school of thought is placing too much stress on automation and advanced skills so there is no place left for creative thinking. Russian and generally Eastern European approach puts emphasize on cognitive skills and creativity while automation and advanced skills are suffering.
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A visual proof of
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| Math starts with counting. Let's count how many people come here |
Last Edited: Monday, January 13, 2003
