G has all sorts of school related issues but i have to say, EDM has been great for her. i think the visualization of math makes it easier for her to understand rather than rote memorization.
i do wish we as a society would embrace the fact that not every kid learns one way. if we would invest in education to the point where we'd have teachers and cirriculum that would allow for visual learners AND conceptual learners we'd be WAY ahead of the game.
This would involve class size, and that is untouchable. Administrations will not even glance at the issue.
G has all sorts of school related issues but i have to say, EDM has been great for her. i think the visualization of math makes it easier for her to understand rather than rote memorization.
i do wish we as a society would embrace the fact that not every kid learns one way. if we would invest in education to the point where we'd have teachers and cirriculum that would allow for visual learners AND conceptual learners we'd be WAY ahead of the game.
This would involve class size, and that is untouchable. Administrations will not even glance at the issue.
worse, it would involve hiring more teachers.
i know it's a pipe dream at best but i always hope for this. i was a pretty solid student in HS (believe it or not) and i ended up in an honors english class with a teacher that just couldn't teach me. like, at all. she was ALLLLLL concepts all the time and i simply don't learn that way. i practically failed out of her class. it got to the point where she was apologizing to me. when i got her again as a junior i about had a nervous breakdown. thankfully she was amazingly understanding and kind of pawned off my extra credit projects onto some of the other teachers for objective grading and i passed with a C+.
i see it in G now. i know people hate it but i love EDM for her.
Post by downtoearth on Sept 8, 2014 12:46:24 GMT -5
Ok, I'm biased (dad who is a 30+ yr public school math teacher and also nationally recognized for math leadership curriculum, plus I'm good at math), but I also have been looking at my kids' common core math for 4 years now.
Do your curriculum people just suck or something? Our kids do learn many methods from rote memorization of times tables to base-ten to visual graphing, etc. The teachers ARE teaching different methods and yeah, your kid might not get one answer right on a test b/c they know one method that makes sense to them and it's asking for another method that they can't grasp, but that's fine according to the teachers who pass the kids (maybe not standardized tests). I admit that I don't get a lot of the stress over math, so I might be off base, but if your kids teacher is stressed over teaching math, that's not math's fault, it's the curriculum director for your district who has dropped the ball. Most of the district teachers I've chatted with (new and VERY old) have been able to easily adapt to the different methods b/c they are all just different versions of other methods from the past (SIMs, Singapore, MathCounts, Everday, Eureka, etc.), right?
G has all sorts of school related issues but i have to say, EDM has been great for her. i think the visualization of math makes it easier for her to understand rather than rote memorization.
i do wish we as a society would embrace the fact that not every kid learns one way. if we would invest in education to the point where we'd have teachers and cirriculum that would allow for visual learners AND conceptual learners we'd be WAY ahead of the game.
This would involve class size, and that is untouchable. Administrations will not even glance at the issue.