Parents Rise Up Against A New Approach to Math

Nation: Yet another deranged new way to do math method hits the schools to make kids worse off by complicating tried and true methods of solving math problems.

The debate over "Investigations in Number, Data, and Space," a Pearson School series used in thousands of elementary classrooms, including some in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Howard counties, is one of the newer fronts in the math wars. Such battles over textbooks and teaching methods are fueled in part by the anxieties of parents who often feel powerless over their children's education, especially in subjects they know. The curriculum, introduced in the 1990s and updated in a second edition issued last fall, offers one answer to the nation's increasingly urgent quest for stronger elementary math education. The nonprofit organization TERC, based in Cambridge, Mass., developed "Investigations" with support from the National Science Foundation. Some experts and parents find it wanting. "There's very little substance. I read through all the kindergarten curriculum. It's wishy-washy," said Steve Santee, an engineer whose daughter Olivia is in first grade at Cedar Point Elementary School in Prince William. "My wife and I are very fortunate. She's a former math teacher, and we can teach her all the way up to calculus."

Look at how messed up a kid can get from this nonsense.

One recent day at Springwoods Elementary School in Woodbridge, third-graders used a mix of methods to solve word problems. Some had difficulty grasping what skill to apply for which problem. For instance: "There are 28 desks in the classroom. The teacher puts them in groups of four. How many groups of desks are in the classroom?" Ilana Cooper and Audrey Mishler teamed up on the problem. Audrey drew hash marks in groups of four on her paper but stalled. She broke out a set of plastic cubes. Maybe her tactile senses could help. "How about 4 times 28?" Audrey asked Ilana. "Yeah, that sounds good," Ilana said. The teacher, Rhonda Ellington, came over. She put cubes into groups of four. A few minutes later, Audrey and Ilana used their fingers to count the groups of cubes. They arrived at 7, the correct answer.

If you were teaching the fundamentals of math, the poor kids wouldn't have to bust out cubes and hash marks to figure out how many groups of desks there are in the first place. Stop screwing around and just educate once in a while.