You must be joking!

Large excerpt from interview with on Education Next Stephen Wilson is: "a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, served on the National Governors Association-Council of Chief State School Officers “feedback group” for the Common Core standards, and was mathematics author of Stars by which to Navigate? Scanning National and International Education Standards in 2009: An Interim Report on Common Core, NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA."

My comment notes follow.

[Education Next]: Will the Common Core put an end to what has sometimes been termed the “math wars”? In your view, do the math standards resemble those recommended by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and what do you make of that similarity (or lack thereof)?

[W. Stephen Wilson]: The end of the math wars! You must be joking.

There will always be people who think that calculators work just fine and there is no need to teach much arithmetic, thus making career decisions for 4th graders [1] that the students should make for themselves in college. Downplaying the development of pencil and paper number sense might work for future shoppers, but doesn’t work for students headed for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

There will always be the anti-memorization crowd who think that learning the multiplication facts to the point of instant recall is bad for a student, perhaps believing that it means students can no longer understand them. Of course this permanently slows students down, plus it requires students to think about 3rd-grade mathematics when they are trying to solve a college-level problem.

There will always be the standard algorithm deniers, the first line of defense for those who are anti-standard algorithms being just deny they exist. Some seem to believe it is easier to teach “high-level critical thinking” than it is to teach the standard algorithms with understanding. The standard algorithms for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers are the only rich, powerful, beautiful theorems you can teach elementary school kids, and to deny kids these theorems is to leave kids unprepared.[2] Avoiding hard mathematics with young students does not prepare them for hard mathematics when they are older.

There will always be people who believe that you do not understand mathematics if you cannot write a coherent essay [3] about how you solved a problem, thus driving future STEM students away from mathematics at an early age. A fairness doctrine would require English language arts (ELA) students to write essays about the standard algorithms, thus also driving students away from ELA at an early age. The ability to communicate is NOT essential to understanding mathematics.

There will always be people who think that you must be able to solve problems in multiple ways. This is probably similar to thinking that it is important to teach creativity in mathematics in elementary school, as if such a thing were possible. Forget creativity; the truly rare student is the one who can solve straightforward problems in a straightforward way.

There will always be people who think that statistics and probability are more important than arithmetic and algebra, despite the fact that you can’t do statistics and probability without arithmetic and algebra and that you will never see a question about statistics or probability on a college placement exam [4], thus making statistics and probability irrelevant for college preparation.

There will always be people who think that teaching kids to “think like a mathematician,” whether they have met a mathematician or not, can be done independently of content. At present, it seems that the majority of people in power think the three pages of Mathematical Practices in Common Core, which they sometimes think is the “real” mathematics, are more important than the 75 pages of content standards, which they sometimes refer to as the “rote” mathematics. They are wrong. You learn Mathematical Practices just like the name implies; you practice mathematics[5] with content.

There will always be people who think that teaching kids about geometric slides, flips, and turns is just as important as teaching them arithmetic. It isn’t. Ask any college math teacher.

The end of the math wars! You must be joking.

[1] " making career decisions for 4th graders "

This is one of the big problems I have with the kids' school. Their curriculum makes it almost impossible to follow a path towards a STEM career. Our school uses the weak "Everyday Mathematics" curriculum, but even does that poorly--every year, they only get through about 2/3rds of the material. Year after year, those 1/3rds left behind add up. The entire 6th grade math curriculum is a review of 1st-5th grades, because the kids are so poorly prepared for pre-algebra. And even there, they are already 60% of the way through their school year (even counting the week-long trip that is coming up in March) and are only through chapter 5 of a 13 chapter text. Chapter 6 is the always-exciting "Using Multiplication"!! This is supposed to be 6th grade, third trimester work, and these kids have no idea how to work with fractions, calculate the area of a circle, or the volume of anything! This is simply not a track that will allow kids to take calculus senior year of high school, which is what many STEM majors in college need.

[2] "The standard algorithms for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers are the only rich, powerful, beautiful theorems you can teach elementary school kids, and to deny kids these theorems is to leave kids unprepared."

Try the lattice method with large numbers or decimals! At open house for 4th grade this year, the parents were doing a good job of eating the teacher alive. Sure enough the lattice method came up, and someone asked about doing it with bigger numbers. My sister piped up and asked about doing it with decimals--The teacher didn't know how to do it! Another parent, with an older kid, started to explain, and my sister said--"Yes, we know how to do it; the point is she (the teacher) doesn't know how to do it!" Yet, they still spent several weeks doing it this year, and if you used the standard algorithm on your homework, you were graded down.

I remember when the 3rd grade teacher wanted to show his students how well and quickly the lattice method worked. He had someone come up and do the standard algorithm on the board while he did the lattice method. Lo and behold, the teacher won! Our kid came home defending the lattice as "quick!" I had to point out to him that the teacher had cheated; he had drawn the lattice in advance—the most time-consuming part was thus ignored. I showed our kid how long it actually takes to do the two methods. But it's a strange thing, kids can get very defensive about their teachers, even when the teachers are full of … The kid got mad at me for showing him the teacher was wrong.

[3] " you do not understand mathematics if you cannot write a coherent essay "

This is actually a bigger problem than it seems. There has been a push for many years to drive reading and writing into every class, including math. No similar push has been made to get math into reading and writing classes—leaving less math time for actual math. But that's not even the big problem.

Some kids excel at language, some kids excel at math. Not all the kids who are good at one are also good at the other—though many are. In particular, many boys hate the language parts of school (especially when they are forced to write or read self-reflective pieces about emotions, hopes and dreams—sometimes it's better when they are allowed to blow things up with words and read snot jokes.) For many of the boys who struggle with language (and it can be something as simple as have slower-to-develop fine motor skills which makes writing a (literally) painful chore) math is their salvation. They can be good at math without having to put any of it into words.

At least, they used to be able to. Now half the problems are word problems, and half their answers have to be too. This is one of the reasons boys are having so much trouble in school. For the more math-oriented boy, they no longer can escape their weak language skills.

Also, ask yourself this: which do you think is easier for kids to master, a set of 26 symbols with 42 different sounds, joined together in increasingly complex and confusing ways. Or a set of 10 well defined symbols that always mean the same thing and follow simple and easy to experience rules. "Wind" can be something that blows, or "wind" can be something that rolls up. 10 is always 10, 15 is always 15. There is some evidence that pushing arithmetic at an earlier age and backing off on the language skills could be beneficial for a non-negligible segment of kids. In essence, kids can develop a natural and strong understanding of numbers before they develop a similar understanding of phonics, vocabulary, language and the motor skills needed for reading and writing.

[4] " you will never see a question about statistics or probability on a college placement exam "

I'm not so quick to dismiss statistics. I think it is the most-important worst-taught subject in school. If it is not part of the regular math sequence, I think it should be a separate semester-long class at the high school level. Every single day we are bombarded with statistics, and without learning how they can be manipulated, exaggerated, and misused, we are all apt to fly off the handle when we hear our (completely insignificant) RISK HAS DOUBLED! Or 50% of people polled think you're an IDIOT (when they only asked your best friend and your twerp of a brother.) People need a far better understanding of statistics than they currently have. My high school required a one-semester economics course; they should also have required one semester of statistics.

[5] " You learn Mathematical Practices just like the name implies; you practice mathematics"

Amen. I keep telling the kids this one. You can only get good at math and science by doing as many problems as you can get your hands on. If the teacher assigns the even problems, and the book has the answers for the odd in the back, do the odd too! The more, the better.

This is also the biggest problem with the ALEKS online math program. They give a kid three problems, and if they get them right, that's it. Eventually, the kid will be given a test on whether they've really learned it or not, and often will have to repeat the section, again and again—with a feeling of failure instead of mastery. It would have been better to be given many more examples before letting the student cross that topic of their list. It takes a lot of practice to really learn long division or how to find a least common denominator. Practice makes perfect.

Jobs Machine

Dan Mitchell at his "International Liberty" blog showed a graph charting education spending with achievement of 17-year-olds since 1970. The original graph was from a blog post by Andrew Coulson at Cato's "Cato@Liberty" blog. Here's the graph:

The steep blue line represents all education spending. The flat little lines at the bottom shows the percentage change in achievement. For all the spending, we got bupkis...except for the steep dotted line. That's the percentage increase in the number of education employees.

The bottom line numbers are:

Spending on Ed: +140%
Math scores: 0%
Reading scores: 0%
Science scores: -3%
Ed Employees: +75%

Our schools are worse, but they employ more people than ever. Increasing proof that the national education system isn't about education, it's a jobs machine.

Almost there

Last January, I began casually beginning to supplement the 11-year-old girl's math skills. A few months later I took a look at the Independent School Entrance Exam and freaked. The math was really hard and some of the formatting of the questions was meant to seriously trick test-takers. In one 40-problem section, I got 6 wrong--some stupid errors, some misreading, and some because of the format.

At that point I started seriously working with her. I decided to tackle ratios, because that seemed to be the hardest, most frequent kind of question. We spent a month or two ripping into problem after problem. When we were done, she could do them every bit as well as I could, and sometimes better. Yay! We went on to other things like formulas of lines and probability.

Then came the fall and the start of the application season and the bringing in of a test-prep tutor. We're applying to 4 schools, which means 4 applications, 2 parent-only open houses, 2 student-only open houses, 2 parent-and-student open houses, 4 interview/tour days (all during school days), 4 thank you cards for the interviews, 16 different recommendation forms to give to the school and teachers, 4 transcript release forms, several months of meeting with the tutor, and finally, one ISEE exam to take. Only that last one and the last thank you card remains to be completed.

The ISEE is on Saturday. Afterwards we're going over to the nearby Burger King to get her a promised Icee.

It will be a big relief to get all of this over and done with. The ISEE scores come back pretty quickly. The schools send their acceptance notices March 23rd. Fingers crossed. We don't know where we want her to go next year, but we want to have the luxury of choosing for ourselves.

(With all of this, I pity one of her classmates; she's applying to 8 schools, with 8 applications, 8 parent open houses, 8 student open houses, 8 interviews, 1 billion recommendation forms...)

Paying the price

The 9-year-old boy is bored.

This is becoming quite a problem, and he's complaining about it more and more.

First of all he's bored in science class. This particular problem started when I decided to be sneaky. I noticed that "The Magic School Bus" was airing on TV, commercial free in the mornings, so I set our DVR to record it. If you don't know about this show, it is a science-based cartoon where a magical teacher takes her third grade students on science adventures. They might shrink to the size of cells and enter a body to see how the immune system works, or they might go back in time to see the dinosaurs. The episodes are well done and actually informative. If you watch all of them, you really would have a good elementary-school level knowledge of science. When I began recording the show, I didn't tell him to watch it, or even tell him that I was recording it. I thought he might find it on his own on the DVR's menu. He did. It became one of his favorite shows, and he's watched each episode several times.

The problem is, now everything he is supposed to be learning in science class he has already learned from "The Magic School Bus," so he's bored in class. I still think there are valuable things for him to learn in class, and the teacher is one of the best in the school, but most of what he's being taught he already knows. The one good thing on the horizon is the school science fair. In third grade they present an animal (he did Great Horned Owls) and in fourth grade they present either a recent development in science or a major historical invention (his sister did the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity). That project should start up in the second semester, and should help alleviate his science boredom.

The second problem is in math class. Because he's been working on Aleks, and has done a sizable chunk of the 4th grade standard curriculum (in 2 months), everything in his math class is going to be review. The other day they started to work with variables in his class; he said he'd done this already, and the teacher asked him to help her present it. That was nice for him, but he's still bored and frustrated that he isn't learning anything new in math class. As far as I can tell, this problem is permanent. I'm going to keep him moving in math at home regardless of what happens in school. (I spent some time this morning creating and finding some supplementary material on multiples, primes, and factoring.) He needs to spend some time outside of Aleks solidifying some skills that only come through practice: standard arithmetic algorithms for addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Lots of practice with long division (which his school's text book literally doesn't believe should be taught at all.) And lots of work with fractions. But I see him getting to the 5th grade curriculum within a month or two.

That's fine by me. The school's curriculum moves too slowly and they allow no opportunity for kids to work ahead. But moving ahead will make all math at school from this point on review and, thus, boring.

I guess the kid will just have to be bored.

Aleks update

It's been about a month since the boy bumped up to the Level 4 course on Aleks. When he started, he knew about 63% of the fourth-grade curriculum, according to the California state standards.

One month later, he has spent about 9 hours working on the program. He is finding fractions very confusing; in part because he is always trying to figure them out pictorially, and he doesn't know how to go about it. Today however, I got him to some level of understanding of the "bowtie" method of adding and subtracting fractions with different denominators.

Bowtie method:

1) Get a common denominator by multiplying the two denominators together.
2) Multiply the left numerator by the right denominator
3) Put in the correct sign
4) Multiply the right numerator by the left denominator.

I also think I drew enough pictures so that he sort-of gets it. He needs more work on fractions in general, though. Especially converting mixed and improper fractions, and reducing fractions.

I have been assigning him some extra work in multiplication, which the program allows me to do. They call it a quiz, but I think of it more as a review worksheet. Sometimes you just have to work dozens of problems before it really sinks in, and Aleks doesn't do that unless you tell it to.

So, after a month, the boy has learned about 20% more of the curriculum, and currently stands at 84% of the CA standards for 4th.

He is doing about 7 topics per hour, and he has about 32 topics left. So another 5 hours or so should get him through. I would love for him to complete level4 before he does standardized testing in mid-November. That should be doable.

Suburban refuges aren't refuges

When the Best is Mediocre : Education Next

American education has problems, almost everyone is willing to concede, but many think those problems are mostly concentrated in our large urban school districts. In the elite suburbs, where wealthy and politically influential people tend to live, the schools are assumed to be world-class.

Unfortunately, what everyone knows is wrong. Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compared with those of our international peers. Our best school districts may look excellent alongside large urban districts, the comparison state accountability systems encourage, but that measure provides false comfort.

My childhood district, which is considered to be a good one, with a high percentage of college-goers, came in at: 61st percentile in math and 74th in reading when compared to students in other developed countries. Los Angeles Unified comes off badly with: 20 & 25. Milwaukee comes off even worse: 16 & 26.

But the point of the article is to look at those nice suburban districts that so many people rely on. It points out that they aren't keeping pace with the educational attainment of students in comparable countries. In other words, the districts that we think are good, aren't.

Aleks says...

A few days ago, the boy (9) was working on Aleks. He had 3 of 5 pie pieces done, and another one was nearly done. Then, he got a bee in his bonnet and spent over an hour two days straight on the program. It's a really nice problem to have when you think your kid is working too hard and should back off! I didn't want him to burn out.

Still, yesterday, with the promise of getting his very-own real-world pumpkin pie if he finished his virtual math pie, he got through the rest of Level 3. This means in less than a month, he has done 45% of the California state standards for 3rd grade. How well he knows it, I'm not sure. Each topic only needs about 5-6 problems done correctly to pass it. It might be too much of a once-over-lightly approach, but, since math is cumulative, I'm hoping it will stay in his head.

Here are his pies:

Tomorrow, I'll switch his account to Level 4, and he'll take the Level 4 assessment for the first time, and get a brand new pie to work on.

Today, he was very proud of himself, and was shouting: "I won the pie!"

To which I answered; "I two the pie."

"I three the pie," he answered.

"I four the pie."

"I five the pie."

"I six the pie."

"I seven the pie."

"I eight the pie," I said, triumphantly.

"YOU ATE MY PIE!!!" he said as he attacked me.

We laughed and had a good day.

Low-hanging fruit

Valuing Teachers : Education Next

Eric Hanushek presents the case for eliminating the lowest performing teachers. He believes that simply replacing as few as 5% of the worst teachers with only average teachers would pretty much eliminate the education gap with other high-performing countries and would result in a massive increase in our long-term economic outlook.

The key paragraph is this one:

Admittedly, these estimates are subject to some uncertainty. So if you think those that are given here are too high, even though they are based on the best of contemporary research, then just cut them in half. You will still have effects on growth of one-half of 1 percent per year, which produces impacts of $56 trillion over the lifetime of today’s child. In other words, to make the very large effects disappear, you have to make either the very strong assumption that student learning has little effect on the U.S. economy or the equally strong assumption that teachers have little impact on students.

Which is it? If a good education makes a difference, then having a bad teacher also makes a difference. The teaching profession is not a magical Lake Wobegon. Not all teachers are above average.

Premier Preschool Produced Functionally Illiterate Adults

I've been meaning to link to this for ages.

Premier Preschool Produced Functionally Illiterate Adults | EducationNews.org

In the United States, findings of national adult literacy surveys over the last thirty years have revealed tens of millions of adults whose literacy skills are poorly developed.

But rather than trying to address this problem through an extensive and intensive approach to adult literacy education, the major strategy has followed the homily that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Following this approach, we have tried to prevent the problem of poor adult literacy over the long run by improving the literacy skills of children in the K-12 school system. But [...] it has been argued that K-12 education is too late and that we need to improve children’s learning before they get to school. So over the years we have invested tens of millions of dollars in Head Start preschool programs for children 3 to 4 years of age. But since this has been found to not produce the hoped for long term improvements in cognitive skills, it has been argued that age 3 is too late and that we need to start with birth. So now we have committed billions of dollars to Early Head Start for children from birth to age three years.

The article is worth reading in its entirety. It goes on to debunk a major study which is used to justify Head Start. He shows that the study was deeply flawed. The best line in the article is from his fourth point on why the study is wrong:

instead of young adults taking the tests unaided, as called for in the administration procedures of the APL, in the Perry Preschool study, “the interviewer read each of the items to the respondent and could repeat them upon request”

So, on a test of literacy the test takers could have the thing read to them, and those successful results (!) have been used since 1984 to justify the massive spending on Head Start.

Spending time with Aleks

The 9-year-old boy has now used the Aleks program about 4 times. Some of that time was working with their "Quick Tables," which is a math-fact learning tool.

Quick Tables was a bit frustrating at first, because before they throw one math fact at you, they want you to have the keyboarding skills to be able to type in the answer quickly. After several sessions of simply typing in numbers, I punted. Though he was getting faster, he still wasn't getting to the point of the exercise: math facts. So, I took over the keyboard and now do the typing for him. We've used it twice, going over all 4 types of facts, but focusing more on multiplication. The program works cleverly. You begin with very simple facts like x1 or x2, then move up from there. It knows what you know and works on improving. I like it. I also like that it isn't flashy or time-wasting. Many online math games are more game than math. The kid ends up spending their time shooting asteroids instead of doing math.

The second part of the program is the Pie. The boy has a pie chart with each segment partially shaded. The shaded area shows how much of the pie he has mastered. He gets to choose which pie piece to work on, and which topics to learn. For each topic the program offers a few problems with an explanation there if you need it--you don't have to see it if you don't need it. After you've done a few problems--I think you have to get 3 or 4 in a row correct, the program allows you to move on. I'm happy that the boy realizes that three or four problems are not enough to really get a math concept, and he will often choose the "More Problems" option without any prompting from me. After a couple more problems, the program moves him on and back to his pie to choose another topic. He has already mastered 14 topics of the total 127 in the 3rd grade curriculum. That means he has moved from a 55% to 66%, To put it another way, he's learned 11% of the 3rd grade curriculum in just 4 sessions.

Instead of logging into the program and walking away, I sit with him. I can catch when he is going wrong, prompt him to use the explanations, and explain further if he needs it. The one time I walked away, he found it frustrating. I don't think he wanted to look at the explanations, or he didn't understand them if he did.

I also wonder if the initial assessment wasn't off because we did it near the end of a lazy summer vacation. I think that probably caused him to get a lower score on the basic arithmetic, but while sitting with him, I realized he has some big gaps. He's been doing geometry and was confused about the terms perimeter, parallel, and perpendicular. The perimeter problem surprised me a great deal. He was presented with a grid with a shape shaded in the middle. He easily counted the shaded squares to get the area (or multiplied if he could), but he wanted to count the number of unshaded squares around the outside and call that the perimeter. I think he got straightened out now, but he needs to review that a couple of times to lock it in. He also had no clue about equivalent fractions (x/5 = 12/20, what's x?,) but caught on very quickly. I don't think he's done much in the way of fractions at school other than counting what fraction of a figure is shaded.

I'm going to continue working with him every-other or every day if we can manage it. I don't want to do long sessions and burn him out, but he seems to enjoy it, and would often go on longer. Right now, I have my sites set on his standardized testing for this year. He'll do it in November, and at this rate, he should be done with the 3rd grade content and on into 4th grade math by then.

Update: We finally got past the assessment for multiplication, and I saw a great difference in his interaction with it almost immediately. He was shown the grid of multiplication, shown which he's already mastered and which need work. The program then offered several for him to focus on. We must have had some typing problems because there were several x2's that he certainly knew. With the chart in front of him, he quickly became interested in mastering the unmastered. In addition, he now has access to a couple math games. He also worked on a few new math topics in the main section of Aleks. He's almost up to knowing 70% of the 3rd grade curriculum! Wheee.

Aleks says

In an effort to make sure that the 9 year old boy isn't playing catch-up as much as his sister, I've signed him up for Aleks.com's math program. It is an online math tutoring program that I found mentioned on several home schooling and parent websites. It starts with a 30-question evaluation of what the student knows.

I gave the boy, who is going into 4th grade, the 3rd grade evaluation. I wasn't entirely surprised, but I was entirely disappointed, that he only scored 55% on the test. That means he knows 55% of what he should--and that is comparing his knowledge to the California standards (we live in Los Angeles.) He was okay with the basics, but weak in geometry and fractions. His math program is philosophically opposed to teaching long division, so he will need some work with that, and his sister hasn't really been taught unlike fractions either, or division of fractions. Aleks, I hope, will fill in the blanks.

I gave his sister the 6th grade test (she's going into 6th and has been getting a great deal of tutoring in the last 6 months) and she scored a 71% on it--not bad. She already knows 71% of this year's curriculum and school doesn't start for a few days yet.

So, I will be using Aleks for him and not for her.

13 year-olds science experiment

The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees

Man! Wish I'd thought of it!

Spelling it out

The 9-year-old boy hates to write. He was supposed to keep a journal over the summer. Stupid stuff like "My friend had his birthday party today. He took his friends to see "Planet of the Apes". I hated it. After pizza and cake, everyone came back to our house for a pool party. That was fun."

Getting him to write anything is like chopping his arm off. He will literally cry for an hour over his paper. I already knew that one the the hardest parts for him is his expectation of perfect cursive penmanship. He wants his letters to be perfect, and gets very frustrated if they are not.

What I didn't realize until yesterday was how much of his writing problem was due to his lack of confidence in spelling.

Yesterday, he found an IPhone app which seems to have helped him. It is a dictionary app with a voice activated look-up. He can say the word into the phone and get the spelling. He even seems to know enough about the homophones that he caught it when it spelled "weight" instead of "wait".

Hopefully, that will get writing and get the journal done.

Start heading for the exits

Ax Head Start: Ending Programs That Don't Yield Results - TIME

Head Start has failed, but will still live forever:

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't."

Why will it live forever when it has been proven to be useless? Because it employs lots of people who are now political cogs in the wheel of the left. Because the vain hope that preschool will solve all our problems puts up roadblocks in the way of addressing the real issue: our education system s^%$s--that's a problem that many people (teacher's unions) don't want to address because it threatens their jobs.

And the #1 reason Head Start will live forever: Because it makes people feel good about themselves by letting them pretend that they are helping the poor kids who are on the path to being rejected in our society. It's for the children!

Harry Potter Trivia

Trivia Question--How many actors have played Harry Potter in the official WB movies? Not talking Potter Puppet Pals or anything else, just in the major motion pictures.

Update: The answer, I believe is 7. There are 5 people who are listed in the credits as being Harry Potter:

In the first scene of the first movie, we see baby Harry Potter. This role was played by triplets. In the credits they are listed as "Saunder's Triplets", so that is three actors already before before the big shiny "P" of the first title swoops in.

Daniel Radcliffe is obviously the main Harry, so we are up to four.

In the eighth movie, we see another baby Harry, this time played by Toby Papworth. So that makes five.

The question is: Who are the other two actors who have played Harry Potter?

Update and Answer:

Remember in both the second and the seventh movies, Harry took Polyjuice potion. When he did, he remained Harry but took on the aspect of the characters Gregory Goyle (played by Josh Herdman) in Chamber of Secrets, and Albert Runcorn (played by David O'Hara) in Deathly Hallows Pt 1. Therefore both actors can claim to have played Harry, bringing the total up to 7.

Atlanta burns again

(cross-posted on Saltzafrazz)

A massive cheating scandal is rocking the Atlanta school district. A widespread and systematic effort to cheat on standardized tests has been uncovered. It included teachers, principals, staff, and superintendents. In some cases, they literally erased the kids' answers and replaced them with the correct ones.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

You can see the gains in this chart I posted several months ago, where Georgia raised its scores on the national test NEAP dramatically:

Click to embiggen.


It should also be noted that Georgian schools s*^%! If you line up all the states according to their various NEAP scores, Georgia would come in between 33 and 40 just about every time. They do a little better with English Language learners, where they rank around 20, even breaking into the second quintile with a rank of 17 for 4th grade math proficiency.

They s(%& even with the cheating scandal. Atlanta makes up just better than 4% of the population of Georgia. If the scores from the APS system are bogus, that means Georgia did even worse than everyone thought.

Deathly Hallows

All done! Just over a week after beginning it, the 9-year-old boy has now finished the last Harry Potter book. For the record, The Deathly Hallows has 204,796 words, which brings the total number of words to: 1,090,739.

He would have finished it yesterday, but he was so nasty to his sister about reading, and kept stealing her book so many times, he got his taken away last night. He woke bright and early and finished it off.

Now....what next?

Half Blood Prince

It took only two weeks for the now-nine year old to get through "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince." He finished it this morning. He read it all on his own, putting in several 100+ days. There are 168,923 words in it, which brings his HP word count up to: 885,943.

He also is trying to beat his sister through the books. She had a big head start, but he has come on strong the last few books. He started the sixth at about the same time she started the seventh. He got through his book, while she's only about 200 pages into hers. He hasn't exactly been trying to play fair; he keeps stealing her copy so she can't read it. Now he's hot on her tail and will likely pass her in the next few days.

Breakthrough

It was a tough week tutoring the 11 year old in math. When she gets frustrated or confused, she shuts down and stops thinking. We hit a massive wall on Wednesday and it took days (and threats of finding her a different tutor!) to coax her out of it.

We've been doing proportions and ratios, which, now that I think of it, is actually one of the hardest subjects she needs to master before the ISEE. She has had a little exposure to everything else, but this comes out of the blue. It includes algebraic manipulation and a whole lot of reasoning.

But our problem wasn't even with ratios and proportions; it was with fairly simple fraction problems, sometimes with a variable, that she's been doing for months. She is able to do the hard problems, but got stumped on the easy ones. For example, here's a simple unit conversion problem. She couldn't get that you put the mile on the bottom of the second part, so that cancels the mile in the first part:



(Yes, I know that should have been 5280.) That is nothing but reducing fractions with words instead of numbers. She knows how to reduce a fraction! She kept trying to do it the opposite way, and got too frustrated to get it straightened out. This went on for two days in similar forms.

She also was adamant that I had told her, when you had one fraction equal to another with a variable running around, she needed to get the variable to the opposite of where it started. So, if the variable is in the denominator, you have to get it to the numerator (correct); and if it is in the numerator, you had to get it into the denominator (very incorrect!) Take this extremely easy problem:



All you have to do is multiply by 12 and you're done. Except she kept insisting that she had to divide by X! She couldn't accept that that was wrong, and switch to doing it the right way. She kept insisting and insisting that this is what I had told her to do!!! Finally, on the third day, the veil was lifted and she saw the light.

After several very frustrating days for both of us, we got through it. She'll need more time to let it all sink in, but she'll get it.

Order of the Phoenix

I forgot to mention that the boy finished the fifth Harry Potter book last Wednesday. "Order of the Phoenix" has 257,045 words in it. That brings his total Harry Potter word count to 717,020 since July 12th last summer. He read this one in two bits. We started it last November, but he stopped at page 94 and went on to read other things until a month ago. Then, on May 10th, he picked it up again. This time was different than his other forays into reading Harry Potter; this time, he was reading it all on his own. When I picked it up and read a page to him, he got mad and said I was reading it terribly!! So much for guided reading; he's over it!

He's already 157 pages into the sixth.

Math prep

I've been working with the 11 year old, prepping her for the ISEE exam. I've come to realize that half the battle, or more, is finding the right materials. This was true of the boy's spelling as well. Once I found "All About Spelling" the rest was easy.

With math, the trick is to find as many problems as possible. Repetition and experience--practice to mastery, if you want to use the lingo--is the way and the light.

So, I've been hunting for good resources. I'm not exactly shocked that a Singapore Math workbook is currently my favorite. I've decided to work on ratios and proportions for a while, and this book:



has lots of good proportion problems just like the ones on the ISEE.

Of course, the more I look at these books (I worked through all the workbook the other day,) the more I realize how sloppy they are. Even the Singapore one has poorly worded questions and some flat-out wrong answers.

Poorly worded such as: You have a box of known dimensions, filled to height y with water. Rocks are added to bring the level up 10 cm. How has the volume of water changed? Well, of course, the water hasn't changed at all, you just added rocks.

Ann and Wilma share some apples and pears in the ratio 5:7.... Is the ratio the number of apples to pears? or is the ratio Ann's to Wilma's? I assumed the former, because it was closer to the modifying ratio. Unfortunately, they actually meant the ratio of Ann's to Wilma's fruit.

If Joe swam 33 laps on both days... Should that be 33 laps per day, for a total of 66 (which is what I assumed)? or should it be 33 combined on both days? The answer in the back of the book correlates with 33 laps total.

These are books that are republished regularly, you would think that they would fix the errors over time.

Great math website

I just found a great math website for upper elementary and junior high. It's called Purple Math, and it covers all sorts of topics:

Absolute Value, Factoring Numbers, Fractions, Geometric Formulas, LCM and GCF, Metric Conversions, Negative Numbers, Number Bases (binary, octal, etc.), Number Properties (Distributive, Associative, Commutative, etc.), Number Types (natural, integer, real, etc.), Converting between Decimals, Fractions, and Percents, Rounding (and significant digits), Set Notation, , Beginning Algebra Topics, , Canceling Units, Distance Formula, Engineering Notation, Evaluation, Exponents: Basic rules, Exponents: Negative exponents, Exponents: Fractional exponents, Graphing Overview, Graphing Absolute Value, Graphing Linear Equations, Graphing Radical Equations, Graphing Linear Inequalities (of the form "y < 2x + 3"), Inequalities Overview (three solution methods), Inequalities: Linear (such as "2x < 4"), Intercepts, Midpoint Formula, Order of Operations, Polynomials (definitions & "like terms"), Polynomials: Adding & Subtracting, Polynomials: Multiplying, Polynomials: Dividing, Radicals (square roots, cube roots, rationalizing denominators, etc.), Ratio & Proportion, Scatterplots & Regressions, Scientific Notation, Simple Factoring like "2x + 6 = 2(x + 3)", Simplifying with Exponents, Simplifying with Parentheses, Slope of a straight line, Slope and Graphing, Slope and y-intercept (their meaning in the context of word problems), Solving Absolute Value Equations, Solving Linear Equations, Solving Literal Equations, Solving Radical Equations, Straight-line equations (y = mx + b), Variables, x,y-Plane (plotting points, etc.).....

Believe it or not, our just-turned-11 year-old has to know a lot of this stuff by about November of next year for a middle-school entrance exam...which is where I learned it. It's odd that in order to get into middle school, she has to show that she knows middle school math already.

We have a lot of work ahead of us!

Harry Potter and the 8 year old

Last summer, our 8 year old boy, despite my discouragement, became determined to read Harry Potter. So we sat down and read it together. He needed a ton of guidance, and I read two out of every three pages of the first book. We went through it in four days. The second one took us longer, mostly because I didn't want to spend all my time sitting on the couch with him, regardless of my admiration for his enthusiasm. By the time the third one came a along his reading level had jumped substantially--just in time for the standardized tests at school.

Then I made him take a break and read three non-HP books on his own, with no guidance. Harry Potter IV is a loooooong book, and it took a while. We went on to start to the fifth, but he grew tired part-way in and went on to read other things.

Last weekend at a birthday party, I was talking to another parent whose son is the same age. He said his boy was reading the books on his own, and I commented that I didn't think our kid could read it without help.

Boy, did the kid prove me wrong!! On Tuesday he picked up where we had left off. Despite having the busiest week of his entire year--play rehearsals every day after school until 5:30, plus homework and a very busy weekend (rehearsals for his other play, his sister's birthday party, baseball, Big Sunday, etc.)--he managed to read over 130 pages completely on his own.

After struggling to get him to read last year, Harry Potter came to the rescue, After struggling to get him to read independently all this year, Harry Potter again came to the rescue.

Wisconsin vs non-collective bargaining states

In the last few weeks, the post below and ones like it have been circulating around Facebook and the internet (see eg: here, in the comments here: , and here ):

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Their ranking on ACT/SAT scores:

South Carolina - 50th
North Carolina - 49th
Georgia - 48th
Texas - 47th
Virginia - 44th

Wisconsin is currently ranked 2nd. Welcome to the race to the bottom.

The statistics have become so widespread that they've been used by the Economist and Paul Krugman at the NYTimes has pulled similar data.

Rebuttals have pointed out that the SAT is a really bad way to judge educational achievement, since in Wisconsin in particular only a small portion of students—those heading for selective colleges—ever take it:

As it turns out, these ratings are bogus. For each state it adds the ranking for SAT scores to the ranking for ACT scores (and it's not even clear what year the data comes from), but it doesn't take into consideration the percentage of the population who take either test. The College Boards specifically warn against doing state-to-state comparisons for the SAT, because in some states all students are required to take the text, while in others only the best students do. Only 4% of Wisconsin students took the SAT in 2010, and since they tend to be the cream of the crop it's not surprising that Wisconsin does well (but third in the nation, not first). On the other hand, 69% of Wisconsin seniors took the ACT in 2010, and Wisconsin comes in 17th in terms of composite ACT scores.

A more thorough debunking of these statistics may be found here; among the revelations is the fact that the data is from 1999. The owner of this site is actually an advocate of "student organizing"; it is to his credit that he has the intellectual honesty to challenge claims that purport to back up his side of the argument.

So, since I like data, playing with data, and living in data, I decided to look at a much better measure of educational achievement—the “Nation’s Report Card.”

For a long time now, the US Department of Education has compiled NEAP scores. These are the results of exams given nationwide to a massive number of students. They show trends, and apples to apples comparisons can be made easily. The exams are given in Mathematics, Reading, Science, Technology and Engineering, Arts, Civics, Economics, Foreign Language, Geography, US History, World History, and Writing. The exams are given to both 4th and 8th graders. A pilot program has started to test 12th graders as well, but none of the states mentioned above are participants.

Iowahawk, the usually comedic web poster, took a break yesterday from satire to mine some of this data--he compared Texas and Wisconsin, with Texas coming out mostly on top.

As it turns out, I was already compiling data from this same source. I decided to focus on the two main parts of the NEAP results: Math and Reading. The reports for 2009 are available here: Math and Reading.

I looked at three categories of student for each grade level: 1) All students, 2) Students eligible for subsidized lunches—which is a short-hand way of looking at children in poverty, and 3) English Language Learners. I also looked at two levels of educational achievement: 1) students meeting basic requirements and 2) students testing as proficient. I took the 50 states and sorted them from best to worst and gave them their numerical rank (I gave states with ties the same rank.) The charts below show the numerical rank of each state with respect to the other 49. (Some students, such as people with reading disabilities, are granted special accommodations for the exam, I used those scores for the data below.)

It is clear that Wisconsin does quite well, especially in math, but the results are really not much to crow about. Wisconsin’s reading scores are actually surprisingly low. The best ranking for Wisconsin in math in any of the categories came in at a rank of 8—that was for 8th grade English language learners testing at the basic level. In reading Wisconsin achieved a rank of two for educating ELL students in 8th grade to basic levels. It should be noted, though, that ELL students do very badly overall.

Here is what I found:

4th Grade Math



For all students, and for these six states—remember Virginia, the Carolinas, Texas, and Georgia are used for the comparison because they do not allow their teachers to collectively bargain—Virginia, North Carolina and Texas are all better at getting kids a basic understanding of 4th grade math than Wisconsin. Wisconsin is the best of the bunch at getting kids to a proficient level, but 13 other states in the union actually do better than the cheese state, putting the dairyland in the second quintile. The percentage of Wisconsin students ranking at basic and proficient levels are: 85% and 45% respectively.

For students in poverty, Wisconsin gets a ranking near the middle of the 50 states: 22 for students reaching basic levels, and a better 19 for students reaching proficient. In Wisconsin 73% of students in poverty can do math at a basic level and 24% are proficient.

For English language learners, Wisconsin is well above the median for the 50 states with rankings of 14 and 13, however, among the six states presented here, Wisconsin actually does poorly, only Georgia does worse. In Wisconsin 66% of ELL students in 4th grade are at the basic level and 15% are proficient. The ELL scores, though, do have a caveat: not all states report these results. On this exam nine states did not report: Alabama, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Whether those states would change the rankings can not be known from this data.

8th Grade Math



For 8th graders, Wisconsin does well overall, getting more kids to the basic and proficient levels than the other five states, and makes the top ten for overall basic skills. The percentage of students scoring at basic and proficient are a respectable 79% and 39%. Texas shows itself to be very good at educating children in poverty, getting a basic rank of 3 (they are tied for third place with South Dakota and Massachusetts, and North Dakota and Montana do better,) and a proficient rank of 9. (Wisconsin’s scores are 60% of student in poverty achieve the basic level, 20% proficient.) South Carolina is again the best at educating English language learners, tying with Virginia for the number 2 spot at the basic level and getting the second rank for proficient as well. Wisconsin does well (45% at basic, 9% at proficient), but lags behind Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina—Georgia did not report these scores, neither did: Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming (16 states did not report ELL scores.)

4th Grade Reading



Wisconsin does surprisingly poorly on this exam. For a state that is said to have a good educational system, scoring below or at the median for reading among all students is not the educational beacon it’s been made out to be. Only 67% of Wisconsin 4th graders read at a basic level, only 33% are proficient. For students in poverty, the numbers are even worse. For the first time in the data I’ve looked at, Wisconsin falls into the bottom quintile of states, wracking up a pathetic rank of being the 42nd best (worst!) state in which to be a student in poverty. Of these six states Wisconsin is the worst at educating students in poverty (with SC tying at the proficient level.) In Wisconsin, less than half—only 46% of 4th graders in poverty read at a basic level, and only 15% are proficient. My own state of California is in the dead-last position, with only 38% of students reaching the basic level, and only 10% reaching proficiency. Again, South Carolina seems to understand how to teach English language learners, or their cohort of ELL students is different from the ones in other states. They have the honor of being at the top of the league in ELL. Wisconsin is better than Georgia among these six states, but is the second last in both basic and proficient ELL students. (Eleven states did not report their ELL scores.) Among ELL 4th graders in Wisconsin only 31% are at basic and 8% are proficient.

8th Grade Reading



By comparison to the other five states in this dataset, Wisconsin does well at educating students in 8th grade reading. However, with the exception of ELL students, Wisconsin still isn’t doing very well. Wisconsin has a 50-state rank of 19 and 15 for educating all students to the basic and proficient levels respectively. In Wisconsin 78% of 8th grade students reach the basic level of reading, and 34% are proficient readers. Again Wisconsin is below the national median at educating students in poverty to the basic level of competence (61% of students in poverty achieve basic scores), but does slightly better than the median at getting kids to proficiency (18%). The ELL exam is again hampered by the fact that not all states report these results; in this case nearly half (23) failed to report. Among Wisconsin’s ELL students in 8th grade, only 49% can read at a basic level and only 7% are proficient.

Conclusions: Don’t send your kids to school in Georgia! Georgia did poorly across the board, though in a couple categories Wisconsin actually did worse. Wisconsin comes in at being a better-than-average state for education, but not if you are a student in poverty. Of the 24 categories presented here, Wisconsin was the best of the six states in nine of them, Virginia: eight, South Carolina: seven (all ELL), Texas: four, North Carolina: one, and Georgia: none.

Does Wisconsin’s collective bargaining state shine above the ones without it? Not according to this data. Unlike the skewed SAT results, this shows these states doing some things well and some things poorly. None are shown off in a really good light, and Wisconsin’s reading achievement is surprisingly bad when compared to its reputation as a great state for education.

Future reporter

A couple weeks ago, the boy (8) decided to make a newspaper with stories he could get from students. That part fizzled, but with the Winter Concert coming around the same time, he morphed it into a series of interviews with some of the staff at the school. Each interview is about five minutes long, and he asked really good questions. I helped him to write an introduction to the videos and created a blog to host it. Here it is:

The Segar Press

Dumb question? or testing external knowledge?

Results are out for the science section of our "National Report Card" (NAEP exams). The news is that the US had pathetic results, surprise!

I was looking through the sample questions and came to this question (click for full-size image:)


The correct answer is, of course, D; however, I don't see how you can possibly answer that question based on the "web" they showed. According to the graphic, decomposers are the ultimate consumers, in the end, eating everything. But the graphic does not show them being the food source of anything.

Despite the top part of the question stating "use the information in the food web to answer the questions that follow," the only way you could answer that question is to ignore the graph and use your own knowledge of the topic.

The need for phonics...in college?

This is a story about British education, but I think it is a sad commentary on a lot of today's education in the US as well:

The report also found that many pupils were being held back by a failure to use phonics – the back-to-basics method of teaching pupils to read by breaking words down into individual sounds.

It said there were “few instances of systematic phonics teaching” in secondary schools or colleges, even though it was proved to help pupils struggling the most.

If a young adult--which is what college students are--needs help from phonics instruction, I would postulate that that individual has no business being in college in the first place*!

* People with learning difficulties such as dyslexia excepted.

Math inequality

This is about twice as long as it needed to be, but it's worth watching:

From Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, why do boys outscore girls on the math SAT?



(cross-posted on Saltzafrazz)

Goblet is in the can!!

The boy and I just finished "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire". Yay!!! That one has 190,637 words in it. Add that to the previous 269,338 that we've read in the first three books, and we've done 459,975 words of Harry Potter since June. Cool beans!

The Lost Hero

LOTS OF SPOILERS FOR THIS BOOK ARE BELOW. READ ON WITH CAUTION!!!

Two nights ago, I couldn't fall asleep until after one, despite trying.

Last night, I didn't try. At midnight, I was loading and reloading Kindle updates hoping to get the download of the new Heroes of Olympus book "The Lost Hero", by Rick Riordan. It finally downloaded at about 12:15... and I read for over 2 hours before forcing myself to go to sleep. I finished it (576 pages) this evening.

After reading the Percy Jackson series (Greek Mythology) several times, and reading the first of Riordan's Kane Chronicles (Egyptian mythology), I was eager for something new. I also wondered what Riordan could possibly do in the same world as the Percy Jackson stories, when he seemed to have blown through every major and a lot of minor stories from ancient Greek Mythology. What was left to work with?

Well, his answer was to overlay Roman mythology on top of the world he built centered on the Greek. Along came a hero who seemed to be the son of Zeus, but slowly it is revealed that he's really more the son of Jupiter. But wait, you say, isn't Jupiter just the same guy as Zeus with a different name? Yes, and no. It is the same god, but he has different aspects, and different personality traits reveal themselves when he portrays himself as Jupiter as opposed to Zeus. As Jupiter, he is more stern, more rigid, more distant, and more authoritarian--the god of an empire. Zeus is a little more easy-going than his Roman aspect.

So when Zeus has an affair with a woman, their offspring naturally speaks ancient Greek, ends up at Camp Half Blood, and calls dad Zeus. But when Jupiter has an affair, that kid naturally speaks Latin, ends up at a Roman camp (the name is never divulged in the book) and calls dad Jupiter.

That means that there are two groups of demigods: the Greek and the Roman. From time to time in history, the two sides meet...and usually pretty much destroy each other. After a particularly brutal war in the 19th Century, the gods decided to keep the two sides completely apart, and should they meet, all memories of the contact would be wiped out of their minds. Thus, each is completely unaware of the existence of the other.

First, a little history: Several thousand years before, after the first Titan war, it was followed by an even worse war, as giants were brought forth with the sole purpose of destroying the Olympians and getting revenge for the Titans. That war ended in Olympus's favor. Now, after the second Titan war (the Percy Jackson books), history is again repeating itself, and the giants are again on the move. This second war has the potential to be far more devastating that Percy's.

Along comes Hera/Juno, who takes a desperate gamble. She believes that only by uniting the two demigod factions, can the war be won. So she makes an exchange: A Roman demigod leader for a Greek demigod leader. She sends the leaders of both camps to the other camp, in order to attempt to establish good ties between the two. Thus, Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon, disappears to the Roman side, and Jason, son of Jupiter, appears on the Greek side. Thus also, the "lost hero" of the title, actually refers to both of these exchanged demigods, since they have each disappeared from their regular worlds, and though Percy can't be found, Jason is pretty lost in this new world of his.

Of course, it takes pretty much the entire book to figure all of this out, because the Roman demigod's memory of his past has been completely erased, and all of this is revealed to him slowly. Percy plays no part in this book, except as someone being sought by others.

Another interesting theme, is the redemption of Aphrodite and her kids. In the first series, they were portrayed fairly relentlessly as beautiful, shallow, vain, spoiled, and wimpy. In the end, also, the leader of the Aphrodite kids turned out to be a (very repentant) spy for the Titans. In this book, far from being a vain wimpy, the lead girl--daughter of Aphrodite--is strong and capable, and doesn't care a lot about her looks. Aphrodite appears in the book and reminds her daughter that she was the first Olympian (the last book of the PJ series was called the "Last Olympian"), the offspring of Ouranos himself (while Zeus is only his grandson), and that she is far more than a pretty face. In the previous book, Riordan defended the hearth and the home by promoting the goddess of the hearth, Hestia (the last Olympian). In this book, he promotes love and devotion by defending Aphrodite.

The book, I think, is quite as good as the Percy Jackson books. It was fun, and funny in places, and the story was certainly engaging. I can't imagine that anyone who liked the Percy books would dislike this one.

Now I'm looking forward to the next. Interestingly, the next book is titled "Son of Neptune". That could easily refer to Percy, if the second book centers around him finding his way in the Roman world, but it could also refer to an unknown, and as yet undisclosed, brother. Should be interesting.

How far behind in math are the kids? (Updated)

I was searching last night for a supplementary math curriculum to do with the kids. The school uses "Everyday Mathematics" which is renowned far and wide for its suckiness. At least the school sort-of acknowledges this and does actually insist that the kids master basic math facts. They do regular one-minute exams and need to get a certain number of problems done in that amount of time. This is particularly hard for our pokey 5th grader, who has to make it though 50 multiplication problems in a minute by the end of the semester--currently she'd doing 27-30.

After looking through a bunch of curricula and reviews, I eventually bowed to the inevitable and bought two semesters of Singapore math (they break each year into two semesters, A and B--sold separately, of course.) The problem is figuring out how far behind the kids are! Because the kids are in grades 3 and 5, it seemed to make sense to buy 3A and 5A. I was guessing that the kids would at least be able to grow into them.

I was also looking at the curriculum's "placement" tests, which are actually tests at the end of each level to see if your kid is ready to move on. I know there are things on the test for the end of level 3A that our 5th grader would have a lot of trouble doing. And, no way our third grader could! It looks like I'll have to go further back for the 3rd grader, and hope I won't have to go further back with our 5th grader too! It would really be hard to convince her that she needs to go back and learn second grade math!

At least, I know the goal: get the 5th grader to algebra by 8th grade.

Update: The Singapore Math books came today, and I'm very very happy to report that our 5th grader will certainly not have to go back to level 3A. I don't think there's anything in there that she doesn't know how to do. I'll give her a few pages of review, just for practice, and move on from there,

I am also happy to say that the level 3A workbook is a pretty good fit with our 3rd grader. So, he'll be working with that one. He will need to review his multiplication tables through 5, but he has most of those down (counting by 2's is easy, 5's is easy, and I taught him the 3's song from School House Rock, so all that's left is 4's.) Some of the problems in the 3A book were actually very similar to what he's been doing in school lately.

Why do they make it so hard!!!

Yesterday, I was helping the boy do his homework. He had 6 3-digit subtraction problems to do, and I let him get on with it. In the end, though I realize he'd done 5 out of the 6 completely wrong, and got the 6th wrong as well.

Since I know he knows how to do this, it was obvious that he was forgetting something. Nope! He was taught a new method today at school! So now, instead of knowing how to do it, and usually getting them all right, he's screwed up, confused, and frustrated by the new method.

Of course, this comes from Everyday Mathematics. The new method has the kids adding in the middle of a subtraction problem:

     754
    -472
    ----
       2
      80
    +200
   -----
     282

This is the big problem with Everyday Mathematics. They think it's important for kids to experiment with different methods, so that they can find the one they like best. Instead of picking one, simple, algorithm and working towards mastery, they keep throwing in new methods which--I swear--have the main purpose of confusing and frustrating the kids and flat-out preventing mastery.

Considering that EM was put together by Bill Ayers' education department at Chicago, I wouldn't be surprised if this actually was the goal. After all, math is hard! And if some kids can't get it, it really isn't fair that some do, and those who do go on to have challenging careers, stable lives, and become wealthier than average. Since we don't want that evil future inequality, let's just nip this dangerous math thing in the bud right from the start!

The more I see of Everyday Math, the more evil it looks.