Have you asked your second grader recently what 3 x 8 is?

Does your fourth grader know how to do long division?

Chances are that if you attend school - public , or sometimes private - you have a child desperately behind his/her counterparts in Europe, the Far East, and the rest of the world.

For the past 15 years or so there has been a national strategy implemented by the education establishment to get kids so far behind in math that their parents sign up for private tutoring services. This strategy is creating chaos in classrooms around the country, as America falls far behind in teaching adequate skills for life-long success in any professional endeavor that involves math.

The state of Washington has produced two videos that are excellent in their descriptions of the disaster of "fuzzy math": has produced:

M.J. McDermott

Cliff Mass

Wheres The Math?

Washington State ed officials may not be listening, however:

Some parents leery of new math
Techniques help, proponent insists.
By JANESE HEAVIN of the Tribune’s staff
Published Wednesday, February 21, 2007

LINK

A national math consultant spent two hours in Columbia last night trying to convince parents that the way they learned to do math won’t help their children succeed in today’s technological world.

Teaching traditional methods of solving math problems can even prevent children from understanding numbers, said Ruth Parker, CEO of Mathematics Education Collaborative, based in Washington state.

Hosted by Columbia Public Schools, Parker is a proponent of the "Investigations in Number, Data and Space" curriculum now used in Columbia’s elementary schools.

The curriculum uses workbooks and kits rather than textbooks and asks students to solve problems in ways other than traditional methods.

Parents argue that they don’t understand the reformed math, which some believe isn’t the most efficient way to solve problems. And without textbooks, parents say it’s difficult to help their children.

Speaking last night in the Monsanto Auditorium at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Life Sciences Center, Parker spent two hours challenging attendees to mentally solve basic math problems.

When asked to subtract 18 from 43, for instance, some in the audience said they altered the numbers, such as adding 2 to both, to create a simpler problem.

Parker shunned old-fashioned subtraction to solve the problem. Simply knowing an answer without understanding it is useless because the information can just as easily come out of a calculator, she said. "When you don’t have a pencil and paper to make sense of it, the information coming out of a machine won’t make sense."

Parent Jennie Harvat didn’t buy it. She said her fifth-grade son struggles with the concepts, even though he’s good at the traditional methods she’s taught him at home. He’s lost confidence not only in math, but also in school, Harvat said.

Parker said she couldn’t imagine a child not understanding conceptual math.

The child "could just have a lousy teacher," she said, encouraging Harvat to play math games with her son at home.

But Harvat later said the family already dedicates much of their evenings trying to figure out the new math.

"The fact remains, I’ve got a fifth- grader, a very intelligent son, who is struggling immensely, and there is nothing I feel I can do about it," Harvat said. "I do understand the idea of giving them different ways, but he wants to know why he can’t just write it out."

Harvat said she thinks she might have to enlist the help of a private tutor to teach her son math. "He needs help, and I can’t do it on my own," she said.

Another concerned parent, Michelle Pruitt, wants to organize a committee to more closely examine the math curriculum. Pruitt, who took her math concerns to the Columbia Board of Education earlier this month, plans to host an informational meeting next month.

Reach Janese Heavin at (573) 815-1705 or jheavin@tribmail.com

Editor Betsy Combier: My fourth daughter, when she was 9 years old, wrote an article on her dislike for TERC math, and her piece was published in the NY SUN and posted on this website:

WHY TERC? Asks a 9 year old, Who Questions the Value of 'Fuzzy Math' For Her Future Academic Goals

Math Wars in America's Public Schools

New York Times Opinion: Judith Warner
June 1, 2006, 10:29 pm
The Fog of ‘Math Wars’
Tags: Education

I’m not used to being a cheerleader for the Bush administration. But when I saw recently that the president had convened a National Math Panel to study, in part, the effectiveness of teaching kids so-called “constructivist” math, I stood up, put my hand over my heart and shouted, “Amen.”
About six months ago, The New York Times published a fascinating article about a town of engineers and scientists in Penfield, N.Y., who were gradually waking up to the fact that their kids, educated in a constructivist or “inquiry” program, which emphasized pupils’ “constructing their own knowledge” rather than learning math formulas or computational rules, were unable, by junior high school, to make change at McDonald’s or multiply two-digit numbers.

I came upon this article at precisely the time I was trying to get my own constructivist-schooled third-grader to stop adding and subtracting on her fingers, so I read it with great interest – and dismay.
School officials in Penfield dismissed parents’ complaints about the curriculum by saying that math scores had steadily increased since the late 1990’s, when teaching constructivist math became the local norm. Yet there was evidence that this improvement had less to do with the school’s instruction than the fact that parents were increasingly teaching their kids old-fashioned math methods themselves. Even the town math champion, who’d been paraded around as a poster boy for constructivist math when he’d become the top scorer on his high school math team and earned a perfect 5 on his advanced placement calculus exam, had, it turned out, been “covertly tutored” in traditional math by his parents.

“My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the (constructivist) program,” he told the Times. “Whatever I’ve achieved, I’ve achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There’s a reason we go to school, which is that there’s someone smarter than us with something to teach us.”

I hear stories like this all the time in Washington, D.C., where the constructivist program Everyday Math — also known as Chicago math — is taught just about everywhere, and where old-fashioned strategies like flash cards and basic memorization are dismissively shrugged off as “drill and kill.” As in Penfield, where hundreds of kids now are in remediation classes to learn basic computation, I see parents in D.C. routinely outsourcing their kids’ basic math instruction either to tutors or to themselves.
This does not appear to bother those parents who have seemingly unlimited amounts of money or time. (I’ll always remember the way a table of parents at a private school I once visited crowed, as a teacher walked by, “He’s our favorite math teacher! He tutors all our kids!”) But for parents who are already stretched and stressed, it feels deeply unfair. It’s troubling, too, to watch kids walk away from the classroom experience with the belief that they themselves are deficient.

It would be wonderful to think that the Bush administration’s new math initiative will put the needs of these kids center stage and take a truly judicious approach to figuring out how best to serve their needs. I fear, though, that much is working against that outcome. The debate over teaching math, already dubbed the “math wars” (for a one-sided sampling see this collection of articles) has quickly become ideological, as did the earlier debate over how best to teach reading (conservative phonics vs. progressive “whole language” learning). And that’s a great pity, because politics have little in common with what works best for children in the classroom: flexibility and open-mindedness on the part of instructors, for starters.

There’s much to recommend constructivist math – it’s often fun, it keeps kids engaged and it allows them, when it works, to embark upon more intellectually challenging kinds of number problems than their grade level would normally permit. (In my daughter Julia’s case, once we began to supplement the school’s curriculum with flash cards and the “Multiplication Rock” CD, she began to find math “easy” and “fun.”) But, like the whole language approach to reading, which can work miracles for some kids yet is nightmarish for others, constructivist math doesn’t work for everyone – and, from what I’ve come to understand, it really shouldn’t be taught in isolation to any child.

All kids, regardless of their individual strengths, weaknesses or styles, learning specialists say, need to be grounded in the basic building blocks of math and language skills before they can take the next great leap into creative thinking or abstract thought or more advanced mathematics. The best classrooms – the best teachers – mix their methods and present information to different students in different ways. In other words, teachers shouldn’t be narrow-minded, and curricula shouldn’t become dogma.

It takes money, though, to train or hire teachers who have the knowledge and know-how to tailor their teaching styles to students’ individual learning needs. And it takes smaller class sizes than most schools can now afford. So far, neither of those costly realities has registered high on the president’s list of educational priorities. No wonder critics of the Bush administration’s attempt to take on this issue worry that this latest, and largest, staged battle in the math wars has been lost in advance.

That the administration has brought the long-simmering debate over constructivist math to the front burner of national consciousness is undoubtedly a good thing. But I predict that if this curricular issue immediately gets caught up in the battleground of left and right and becomes an either/or, standardized-test-defined, cost-efficiency issue, then the needs of our nations’ kids are sure to be shunted out of the equation.

Warner's book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety" (excerpt, NPR interview), a New York Times best-seller, was published in February 2005. She is currently the host of "The Judith Warner Show" on XM Satellite Radio. "Domestic Disturbances," which first ran on TimesSelect in January and February, will now appear every Friday.

Critics contend math doesn’t add up
By JANESE HEAVIN of the Tribune’s staff
Published Sunday, February 18, 2007
Patrick Crabtree watched his fourth-grade son struggle for hours to solve two math problems last year.

LINK

It wasn’t that Connor Crabtree, now 11, didn’t know the answers, his father said. Connor is in the gifted program and has a head for numbers. But he didn’t know how to solve the problem the way he felt his teacher wanted him to.

"My son was coming home with an average of two problems and spending two hours on problems he already knew, if he could just do them," Crabtree said. "It’s frustrating."

To some parents, Columbia Public Schools’ districtwide elementary math curriculum, "Investigations in Number, Data and Space," doesn’t add up.

"It’s dumbing down our kids," said Crabtree, a vocal opponent of the curriculum since its inception four years ago in Columbia. "Why are we doing this? They’re not going to be able to handle higher math, and they’re not going to be able to get into fields of math and engineering."

The new methods of teaching math are giving students a better understanding of mathematical concepts that they will be able to apply later in life, said Columbia’s elementary math coordinator, Linda Coutts.

"The idea about why math looks different is about the child and trying to talk about what’s going on in the child’s mind," Coutts said. "We hadn’t been doing a good job of teaching mathematics for many, many years. Doing the same things we’ve done in the past is not going to help the child make sense of numbers."

The Investigations curriculum - developed by education research and development organization TERC - provides students with activity booklets and kits of materials such as play money or interlocking cubes. The kits don’t include traditional math textbooks, which Coutts said research shows are large and unfocused because they’re marketed for wide audiences.

Instead of memorizing traditional methods to solve problems, Investigations shows students several different ways to add, subtract, multiply and divide.

"We’ve used the same teaching of math since forever," said Chris O’Gorman, a fourth-grade teacher at Benton Elementary School. "And children who were really good at math, the gates were opened for them and away they went. Children who weren’t good were separated and put into lower math. The newer approach is a much more democratic way because the whole idea is that children understand math, not just the kids automatically good at it. It opens up the world of math to a much wider population."

Using the newer methods, O’Gorman said his third-grade son can quickly solve math problems in his head. When adding three-digit numbers, for example, a student can mentally add up the numbers of each column from left to right, then add the solutions from each column to get the final answer. For instance, 324+128=400+40+12=452.

"That’s what students do when no one is around to tell them how," Coutts said. "It’s easier mentally. We read from left to right, so it’s natural."

Investigations division can become a pattern of subtraction and multiplication. Long division has been the "nemesis of elementary schools" for many years because it takes children a long time to master it, Coutts said.

But parent Michelle Pruitt told the Columbia Board of Education last week that her son "saw very quick results" after she enlisted a private tutor to teach him standard math. She said her son "had no idea how to do long division" when he left elementary school, which she feared would hold him back in higher math courses.

O’Gorman said most teachers allow students who know and understand the traditional ways of solving problems use them.

"If a child comes in knowing an algorithm that hasn’t been taught, the way Investigations works is that we’re going to highlight that child and ask him to show other children what he’s doing and how he’s doing it."

Coutts said higher scores on assessment tests indicate the Investigations program works. Within two years of implementing the curriculum, Benton Elementary saw a 23 percent increase in the number of fourth-graders scoring proficient or above on the math portion of the Missouri Assessment Program, according to TERC’s 2004 assessment of its curriculum. Since all Columbia elementary classes began using the program in 2003, the number of fourth-graders scoring proficient or above has increased by 5.1 percent.

But national opponents say students who learn the Investigations system are roughly two years behind where they should be. Mathematicians believe in memorizing traditional methods because "the ability to compute is a basic skill, absolutely necessary to succeed in high school algebra, just as mastery of high school algebra is crucial for success in college mathematics," Harvard University math Professor Wilfried Schmid said.

Thomas Parker, a math professor at Michigan State University, argues that TERC provides little mathematical content and covers nothing in depth other than whole-number mental math.

Divide and conquer
Some math techniques being taught in Columbia Public Schools might look different to parents than what they learned as children.

Reach Janese Heavin at (573) 815-1705 or jheavin@tribmail.com.

Illinoisloop has alot of information on the math war