Renegade Parents Teach Old Math on the Sly

(Thanks to Jay Lake for the link)

This bit describes a bit of how we felt trying to help our 4th grader with her math this past year:

“Sometimes I’ll meet up with another parent, and we’ll say, ‘What WAS that homework last night?” says Birgitta Stone, whose daughter, Gillian, is entering third grade in Ridgefield, Conn., next month. “Sometimes I can’t even understand the instructions.”

Funny, perhaps, but also a little sad. “It’s frustrating,” says Stone. “You want to help them. And sometimes I can’t help her at all.”

I like the new math’s approach– teaching the reasoning behind math before its functionality.  What saved us from complete and total confusion was that we were introduced to this concept the year before– when we homeschooled our daughter.  Because her teacher wasn’t teaching…math.

🙂

This paragraph really stood out for me:

One problem, Cooney says, is that parents remember math as offering only one way to solve a problem. “We’re saying that there’s more than one way,” Cooney says. “The outcome will be the same, but how we get there will be different.” Thus, when a parent is asked to multiply 88 by 5, we’ll do it with pen and paper, multiplying 8 by 5 and carrying over the 4, etc. But a child today might reason that 5 is half of 10, and 88 times 10 is 880, so 88 times 5 is half of that, 440 – poof, no pen, no paper.

“The traditional way is really a shortcut,” Cooney says. “We want kids to be so confident with numbers that it becomes intuitive.”

This describes my approach to simple math exactly.   I did this all the time in my high school geometry class, and my teacher used to dock me points for not showing my work.  Fie on you, Mrs. Whatsyourname.  My genius has been vindicated by the ESTABLISHMENT.  Haha!

This isn’t the first time that math has gotten a grade-school overhaul; Charlie Brown bemoaned it back in the 70’s (I think).