Hacker News Reader

Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

My second grader has a ton of anxiety over the confusing and disorganized lessons & homework that are coming out of the "Everyday Math" textbook that his teacher is using.

Hmm, I wonder who wrote this Everyday Math curriculum...oh, look at that. It's the University of Chicago.

(And yes, I'm opening that door.)

View on HN

Don't see why you were downvoted. My daughter had the same experience with Everyday Math in a top-tier private school: intense anxiety. Now she's in a good public school with Houghton Mifflin. Say what you want about public school and Houghton Mifflin, but her standardized test scores have gone from 'needs remediation' to 'consider advanced placement' and while she still doesn't rank math as her favorite subject, she doesn't actively combat it.

I'm going to side with you here. Loved math as a kid. My high school then used the Chicago series, and I barely got past “Functions, Statistics, and Trigonometry”. I later got a bachelors and masters in mathematics from pretty good schools, reveling in abstraction and structure.

(Said logic compels me to say it's impossible to know whether the Chicago textbook series was responsible for that earlier poor performance, and not the more likely issues of the specific teachers, family, or adolescence. But! Anecdote.)

You know, something just clicked in my head: isn't Chicago famous for Econ? That's pretty low bar in math, isn't it?

That makes me so angry. We live in the 21st century, we fly to the moon and rovers to Mars and build microchips yet we can't teach our kids math effectively.

I have seen these books, I have seen this "everyday"-type approach to math also in college for non-technical majors. I looked at Everyday Math links.

They are a disaster. It is simpler to explain the goddam subject than to find round-about "simple" problems and "games" that somehow distantly refer to math but are meant to be "easy" when in fact they are nothing but confusing. They build their own "easy" terminology that is non-standard and they go and apply it.

This is the crap I am talking about:

http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/about/understanding-em/EM20...

The decimals for example. They go about in 10 round-about ways (base-10 block, wtf are those?) before finally showing a number line and asking students to order them. The number line is probably the most useful. I remember learning this from exercises. No base-10 blocks, no "math facts" (why not call them theorems and axioms). Just lots of exercises. Eventually the student internalizes the relationship and builds an internal abstract model.

The confusing part is all these "easy" terminology that tries to help in the end it all looks like an onslaught of random stuff pushed onto the student. They don't know that the author is trying to carefully orchestrate this long and drawn out process of presenting "math facts" so in the end the student reaches an "aha" moment and gets. He gets lost among orange circle with blue borders, playing coin-top-it and base-10 blocks in the end never really reaching the intended "aha" moment be she got stock at the "Decimals All Around Museum"

Who says you have to follow the school's curriculum. Send your 2nd grader to Kumon Math. It's relatively affordable and your child will be out achieving the other kids in no time.

My school district is a pretty well regarded one in my state. I also contribute over $7,500 yearly in property taxes to fund this district. "Relatively" affordable is a complex idea as far as I see it.

You might think a good math education is something you're already paying for, and you may well be right. But a la carte education is pretty cheap.

How does the amount of property taxes you pay matter? It seems to me that it's your responsibility to see that your child gets a good education. The school is just a vehicle for that. If something is lacking then you have 2 choices: work with the school to fix things or supplement your child's education out of pocket. Kumon costs around $100/month/kid. You can judge for yourself whether that's affordable. Btw, many of the kids at my children's Kumon Center had teachers as parents. While it may feel nobler to battle the bureaucracy and to try to get your $7500 worth, your kid will likely have graduated long before you can effect any change.

And yes, you're absolutely right. And this is part of my frustration with schools, curriculua, adminstration boards, and how they all mesh together.

I will probably resort to some other method to make sure my child understand and possibly even enjoys math. I realize that.

But I believe I deserve a right to be upset because one path would give my son a decent education and the other will cost me $1000 a year to fix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com