Some parents at North Beach Elementary School are wondering, “where’s the math?” in curriculum being considered for district-wide adoption by the Seattle School District…

M.J. McDermott and Linh-Co Nguyen, members of the North Beach Parent Teacher Association, say the reform programs favored by the district are low-rigor and don’t efficiently teach basic math skills. While reform isn’t all bad, they said, students should have a balanced curriculum that uses standard algorithms for learning skills like multiplication tables and long division…

The reform approach, sometimes called “discovery math,” began to gain popularity in the mid-1980s. Curriculum began to shift from teaching repetitious “drill and kill” methods to a more activities based form of mathematics where students are encouraged to discover formulas themselves.

McDermott became a member of Where’s the Math?, a group that backs traditional math curriculum, after hearing about Seattle’s math adoption process and choices. She was shocked by what she called “weak” content.

The parents pointed to a unit on Siberian Tigers in a third-grade Investigations workbook. Students draw pictures of various habitats for the animal and are asked questions like “would a tiger hunt a bear?” or “would a bear hunt a tiger?” Part of the problem suggests the teacher pantomime a tigers’ behavior…

Some of the methods are wonderful teaching tools, but are also time-consuming, inefficient and leave more room for error, said McDermott.

She used Investigations’ “cluster method” for double-digit multiplication as an example. Instead of the standard method of placing one set of numbers on top of the other and multiplying and carrying, students are asked to solve a problem using estimation and reasoning skills.

Source: Ballard News-Tribune
http://tinyurl.com/2pqpl2