Elementary School Is Setting Students Up To Fail At Math
Today my niece got her first tutoring session with my husband. My husband is good at math and my niece is struggling in her 4th grade level math so he agreed to tutor her. I hang out to help where I can. Today was just a day of assessing where my niece was at and where we should start.
She is learning multiplication and doing badly at it. Apparently last year her teacher was fired (showed up to school under the influence of alcohol). Because they didn't have a permanent teacher the rest of the school year the kids never learned their times tables very well. A lot of the kids in my niece's grade are struggling because there was no remedial work. They just started doing math at the level they were suppose to be at if they had been taught correctly the year before. Without the previous years knowledge though the kids are basically behind.
Where Are The Textbooks?
Apparently at this school kids don't have textbooks. They have workbooks they keep at school but they don't get textbooks to keep and take home! I would be so angry as a parent if my kid didn't have a textbook. They are given a series of worksheets and that is what they can take home to their parents. The worksheets, as far as I can tell, really have no directions or examples to look at if the kids need help.
Textbooks have a table of contents, a dictionary full of math terms in the back, and tables like times tables in the back kids can use as references. I'm looking through my old books and things to see if I have an elementary math book from the 90s when I was a kid. If I can't find one maybe ebay would have one. She needs a textbook. One from the good old days before they ruined math by implementing common core standards.
WTF Is Common Core Math?!!
The biggest pet peeve I have is this new common core math. The reason I'm not tutoring my niece is because the common core rules are ridiculous and screw me up. I'm not super great with math but I can add and subtract. The common core rules have you jumping through hoops to do something simple like addition. From what I understand my brother has to talk to the teacher regularly because he doesn't understand the common core math at times and he majored in finance and math in college.
Never Learned Tables
My niece was never given a nice table with all her multiplication tables on them. Both my husband and I had to memorize all the multiplication tables. That's how you learn to multiply. Memorization and use of the numbers. My niece wasn't taught to do that. She never was given a table to look at or taught really how to multiply. Having a teacher who didn't do her job was never taken into account when she moved to the next grade. Why isn't their new teacher teaching them the big chunk of knowledge their former teacher got fired and never taught them?
Homeschooling Is Looking Better and Better
I really am disappointed in how our local elementary school is teaching kids. No textbooks they can take home! An alcoholic teacher who didn't teach the kids and got fired! Being forced to follow new common core rules which are over-complicated with ridiculous steps to do a simple math problem! When my daughter is older and ready for elementary school I could teach her better myself. I feel bad for my niece who is struggling and my husband tutoring her is all we can do to help the situation.
I hear it a lot in this area how parents are unhappy with our school systems. Quite a few people I went to high school with are homeschooling their kids. I vaguely remember Tennessee being ranked # 43 out of 50 states in terms of education. Low rates of people getting high school diplomas. Low rates of going to college. We are an incredibly low ranking state in terms of the quality of education.
I want my daughter to succeed in school and I want her to go to a school where she'll receive all the tools she needs to do well. She's not going to a school with no textbooks. She not going to a school where I have to help her struggle to pass because her teachers aren't doing a good enough job. I'll keep her home and teach her myself.
What do think about common core math? Are you happy with how elementary school teach kids in your area?
I never could understand common core math... as in, I couldn't grasp what made someone actually think it was helpful or a good idea, in an way, shape or form. Seems like a bad case of "Let's take something very simple and make it extremely complicated and longwinded."
It is a complicated system. I do feel bad for all the parents who can't help their kids with their homework due to lack of understanding.
I agree completely, @marxrab! I'm not raising kids anymore... I'm a grandfather of 4 little ones, ages 2 - 5. I see how intelligent our grandkids are and wonder about the type of education they'll get in school. This common core stuff is just crap! My daughters know it and (I think) intend to try and get their kids into Montessori school programs. I don't know if they have the same math format as the public schools or not. Hopefull not!
For many parents, homeschooling is not an option. Especially if your work hours don't match up with the kids expected daytime school hours. But if you can arrange it, and are able, I think you're doing your children a great service by homeschooling. Best of luck with your circumstances. I hope to hear more about this from you!
Thanks for the great comment. Both my husband and I are getting our doctorates and plan on working for colleges in some form (teachers or administrative staff.) I feel like we'd be good at homeschooling and I hope when my daughter is old enough for school we can homeschool her at least to start her off.
This got a little discombobulated. Is it your niece or daughter? I suppose that’s irrelevant.
The bottom line is, unfortunately, public school simmers down to the luck of the ‘draw’. We can all think back to the less-than qualified teacher for the job, either emotionally or academically speaking.
What a child doesn’t learn in school, they have to be taught at ‘home’. That’s it. Time’s ticking. I’d be on Amazon ordering flash cards; or quicker yet, at the local teacher’s supply store to buy a box.
Rote memory is something parents should take the initiative for. Basic math facts, and phonetic skills, aka site words, really need to be a part of the child’s repertoire of learning tools.
I’d tape copies of the site words to the fridge; and, flash the facts for ten minutes til they were learned. I’d print copies of worksheets for time tables, and reward for progress made.
The problem with talking about the extraneous problems, is that it doesn’t serve to help the child. That’s all that really matters at this point. Everything else is just a distraction.
Best regards.
Peace.
We are tutoring my niece but I have a one year old daughter who I want to home school when she is older. I added a sentence to clarify. The thing is our local schools use to have better standards. In terms of state tests and educational success things use to be better. Focus has changed. Curriculum has changed. Less funding so there isn't enough money for supplies to teach.
I don't think it's the parents job to teach kids things you are sending them to school to learn. I mean a whole class of kids never learned how to multiply numbers. They missed a huge chunk of math material and the school didn't supply a proper replacement to teach them what they needed and then started them then next year with material more advanced than they were. Basically with my niece we are starting at scratch trying to teach her 3rd grade math when she is in 4th grade because she never was taught 3rd grade math. Then we have to catch her up on 4th grade math. We are having to teach ourselves common core math which wasn't taught years ago just to help her. How can parents pick up the slack in extremely bad cases?
I also think the extraneous problems do need to be discussed if they are part of the larger problem. Not having enough funding to give kids textbooks and relying on cheap worksheets is a problem. A school being aware a teacher has a substance abuse problem but continuing to let her work even though she shows signs of not doing a good job and then not cleaning up the mess of a bad education is a problem. Little problems add up. Though these little problems are for my community and not applicable to larger statewide or nationwide problems. Little things shouldn't be ignored though.
common core math is the reason more parents are looking to homeschooling lol :)
Probably so. My husband and I have both taught college so we think we could do a better job homeschooling our daughter based on our education background.
I just looked up common core education and read a couple of news articles. Apparently California is where this began and was implimented nationwide immediately replacing the former standards without any trial. And the new plan is to take 3 - 4 years to change from this one but not to any previous standard but another modified version of this new common core. It's really sad that our education system has come to this that they "fix" what isn't broken immediately and take an even longer period of time to even try to unfix it. I work in the corporate world and this seems all too similar with how things are developing in the current corporate environment where someone who has an idea is given free reign to impliment their idea not because it's any better but just to please a small group or someone who's "in charge" that their idea is brilliant just to feed someones ego.
Start writing posts @troule !!! lol. You've got a lot to say. I'm going to keep harassing you until you write your first post.
Common Core is ridiculous. Books are one thing we should never lose a grasp on. Real actual physical books. They definitely are necessary for our mind to learn.
The no textbooks concept blows my mind. I don't want a kid having to look up definitions and information on the internet and being dependent on technology to solve their problems. I want my kid to have books and really learn knowledge instead of never learning material and feeling they can always look it up on their phone.
I didn't have kids for so many reasons, but this is one of them, the common core is a detriment to society. It's a methodology of inaccuracy. I would have done great in this system yet I still think it to be dumbing down society. With numbers, there is a right answer.
I never liked formulas and always amazed the teachers that I could logically come up with nearly the right answer, most of the time. But that only gets the student a B.
The first time I saw common core was for simple subtraction problems and my brain had to take a long time to process because it was just over complicated. For people who aren't naturally good at math it can really confuse and hurt students academically. I think that a person should do math the best way for them. If common core works better for some people then go for it...but if the old methods like how I was taught are better for you to comprehend then you should be allowed to use that way instead.
My limited exposure to Common Core made me think it was a wrong way of thinking. If the lower school math confuses the parents, it probably isn't the best idea. Further breaks the family. Parents can't even engage in the homework.
Thanks for your post.
First of all, I just want to say that it's very unfortunate that your niece's 3rd grade teacher failed to do her job properly. A child's education shouldn't suffer because of inappropriate behavior by a teacher. The school district definitely dropped the ball there.
My wife is an educator. She currently teaches third grade, so I was interested in what she had to say about this article. Since she recently graduated with a Bachelor's in Science in Elementary Education and had many courses dealing with teaching methods, we've had many conversations about this subject.
When you and I look at a math problem, we see it a certain way because of how we were taught to deal with the problem. This is usually a simple algorithm that we were taught to apply to numbers that works every time. Therefore we see this as the way it should be done because it's fast and efficient. However, it doesn't really tell us why we're doing it. (Think about borrowing in subtraction or writing a number above another number in double digit subtraction. You know it works, but have you ever considered why it works?)
Common Core is simply a different system by which children are taught to approach the same sets of problems, except with a focus on the "why." For what we consider "simple" math problems like multiplication tables and addition, the methods seem a bit silly. However, when viewed in the context of much harder problems, they begin to make more sense.
I'll refer you to this video. I encourage you to watch it with an open mind. There are a lot of people in the comments of this video who agree very strongly with you that the methods are silly, however, in my opinion he does a great job of explaining the concepts behind why it's taught the way it is. This helps more children be able to understand the "why" behind math, as well as develop mental math strategies for solving more difficult problems down the road. They can also better understand concepts like "place value" this way.
The best analogy I can come up with to explain the importance of understanding the "why" in math is calculus. For anyone who has ever taken calculus, you know that there are shortcut methods for solving problems (specifically when taking derivatives and performing differentiation). However, anyone who has ever learned calculus can tell you why you're able to take the shortcuts, because you first learn the "why" (i.e. limit definition of derivative, area under a curve). Similarly, Common Core is a foundational method of teaching that builds over time.
In your situation, I do agree with you that your niece learning math via the new Common Core standards is a roadblock in you being able to help her. That's where most of the complaints are. Parents and relatives who attempt to help children with their math simply cannot because it's a different system, so in this regard, perhaps the new standards do leave something to be desired. However, I would encourage you not to be quick to dismiss the methods of teaching simply because they are new and different. Many children are able to learn math more effectively this way when they can visualize the "why," so this actually may lead to higher graduation rates.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I just wanted to lay it out from a teacher's (husband's) perspective because I know how hard my wife works to make sure that all of her students understand math concepts so that they can succeed in future grades.
I sincerely hope that your niece is able to succeed. If you need any further direction for how to better help her, please let me know. I'm sure my wife can provide some digital resources that could help your situation!
@tippy vote
@originalworks
Thanks for taking the time to write all that. It's a great comment and I wish I could give you more than 10 cents for it. You make a very good point about it being a different way of teaching and the positive side of it. To be honest my complaint about things is more the local schools and not really common core math. Common core is here to stay and I can adjust to that. I'm getting my doctorate and hope to go back to teaching college so I'm sure I can teach myself common core rules. The shame is all those parents raised to do math differently who can't help the current generation with their homework because they can't understand the new rules.
What does bother me more are things like no textbooks. My niece really needs some kind of reference book to bring home so she can look things up. Money is tight and the local schools are always looking for ways to cut back on costs like no textbooks. The school doesn't give the kids things to bring home to their parents to keep parents informed as to what the kids are learning. I'm having to buy a math textbook because my niece doesn't have anything except her daily handouts and they don't have more than a few math examples. She's very lost and just having a textbook at home to look up definitions and a multiplication table with all the numbers would help her more than anything. She has all A's in everything else and is super smart. Just last year with the alcoholic teacher really got her lost in the one subject.
I appreciate you taking the time to read my comment. It's always good to keep a healthy discourse about these types of issues.
First of all, best wishes in graduate school. I'm in graduate school myself, so I know how challenging it can be. I'm also sure that you can conquer Common Core math, so good luck with that too. You're right. It's tough that parents aren't able to help their kids with homework, and I think that's the main source of the complaints with Common Core methods. Maybe I should produce a video series for an adult target audience about Common Core. Could be a hit... haha or maybe not.
Either way, I understand the textbook thing. Even now in graduate school, I'm glad I kept all of my textbooks from my undergraduate studies because I can reference them as I need them. Especially for things like calculus. Textbooks are another tough issue in schools. My wife tells me that the problem teachers have with textbooks is that by the time the school gets the funding approved to purchase a new set, there may be other better resources that have come out in the meantime, meaning the teachers are less likely to teach from the textbook.
However, there is an argument to be made about having reference materials available to students in tough situations like your niece. You might try asking the school librarian if something like that is available. Librarians are always extremely helpful human beings.
Best wishes moving forward. I hope she's able to recover in math. I credit my love of math as the reason I'm in graduate school now, so I wish her nothing but success moving forward.
Thanks again for your thoughtful response. I think conversations like these make me appreciate Steemit even more.
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