Everyday Math Makes Me Want to SCREAM
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I don’t normally loathe things. But I loathe Everyday Math for the hell it put my daughter through and the poor math foundation it gave her.
Thank you so much.
You Don’t Know How to Subtract, Mom
My breaking point came one Tuesday evening. My sobbing seven-year old daughter told me I didn’t know how to subtract. To learn, I needed to read the four page Powerpoint presentation on her teacher’s website. (Here’s another teacher’s Power Point.) Four. Pages. ABOUT SUBTRACTION. (But, um, I do know how to subtract, don’t I?)
So, like any normal parent, while opening up the file, I ranted on Facebook.
(Did you know there’s a Facebook support group for people like me? –Parents Against Everyday Math.)
Her subtraction was backwards.
It looked like this:
Now, this kind of method is fine for mental math, sure. But NOT for pencil and paper algorithms – it’s confusing and takes too long!
To make matters worse, it’s certainly NOT a good foundation if the math curriculum doesn’t continue like this through middle and high school. A Facebook friend wrote, “After 6 years of homework battles in elementary school, kids get to un-learn [Everyday Math] in middle school with traditional math. How does that make sense to anyone other than the self-appointed Einstein raking it in?”
Everyday Math Leaves Kids Behind
It was bad enough in first grade when AJ didn’t learn money in the one week it was taught, or time in the one week that was taught, or the addition facts when they were taught. She fell farther and farther behind with the promise that the curriculum would spiral back around eventually.
Her teachers through out these years reassured me that, she’d catch on when she was ready and that the research on Everyday Math was extensive, and it was a really a good way to teach math.
[Insert bad word here that starts with BS.]
Because those statements weren’t true. Not good research. Nor did she catch on eventually. (Google EM research and you’ll see, I’m not going to go into it here.)
Since AJ hadn’t learned the basics, she couldn’t catch on to the next spiral months or a year later.
She believed she was stupid.
Conversely, students who excelled in math weren’t challenged at their ability level and were bored. Herein lies a big problem with Everyday Math — it teaches to the middle so you hit the middle kids and leave out the rest.
Blame the Teacher?
An Everyday Math trainer told my friend that it must be because the teachers were incorrectly implementing the curriculum.
Is the curriculum that easy to mess up?
I don’t think so.
. . .
New Math
In a recent phone conversation, Audra Haskins, Director of Lower School at Aspen Academy in Colorado, explained this about Everyday Math, “It doesn’t go deep; there’s not a lot of repetition, review, or application.”
A teacher friend of mine from Twitter added, “The material jumps around so much that mastery is not achieved on any level (at least in second grade.) It doesn’t make sense. I hate it! I am worried about the future of my students because I felt like I didn’t teach solid math this year.”
Investigations is another curriculum in the New Math genre.
Haskins said, “Investigations is designed to assume the kids are good at math and know the skills and apply them. If kids don’t know it, they’re never going to get there.”
Mom of eight and blogger, Gretchen White commented on Facebook, “I LOATHE Investigations. I’ve ranted about it extensively. It’s the main reason we left our former school. I remember our 2nd grader having to count the pockets in our family for homework one night and I realized it was failing him as a mathematician. I’ve been happy with Saxon, although I know there are plenty of Saxon critics. It seems like “real” math, for lack of a better word.”
Want to read more concerns about Everyday Math? Try Concerned CT Parent, Ed Weekly Blogger, Rational American, Amy Johnson, Andrea Merida, parents on this forum, Rox Dover, and Parent Pundit.
To summarize,
3 Reasons I Hate Everyday Math
- Everyday Math does not teach basic number sense.
- Everyday Math makes simple math operations harder than necessary.
- Everyday Math does not differentiate for kids who need longer time or kids who need to move faster.
Cue Music, Enter . . . Singapore Math
We moved schools to one with a FANTASTIC math curriculum — Singapore Math. It goes deep into twelve concepts and teaches to mastery (meaning that kids learn it before moving to a new concept.) Tomorrow I share my happy experiences with Singapore Math. 🙂
What does your school use for math? Or homeschool? What do you like or dislike about it?
See, now I loathe Saxon math. I feel like there needs to be a happy medium between the memorization of basic facts (which seems to be the sole focus of Saxon, from what I’ve seen as a teacher) and something like Investigations. We need to build the basic foundation for students and then teach them how to use those skills to investigate real life problems, because really, what we want is for students to be able to use math in their lives.
I agree – I haven’t seen Saxon myself, good to hear your perspective, thanks!
I totally agree. I’m actually a math consultant working with multiple schools to develop this type of teaching. It takes a lot of ongoing professional development to change the way we’ve taught for years and years, but it’s possible. There has to be a BALANCE. You have to build concepts, which some programs like EM and Investigations attempt to do, but you have to do more than just introduce something once. You have to follow it through, extend the concept, give support and move them to a stage of practicing procedures and algorithms connected to real world problem solving. The Common Core is actually set up to support this kind of learning/teaching. The problem is that teachers need professional development to learn how to teach this way, but professional development days are being cut all over the place.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Parents-Against-Everyday-Math-Investigations-and-Connected-Math/245442798843079
You mean this My page? I started this group after becoming frustrated with my district. I am a statistician with a masters degree in mathematics and became involved in convincing my district to dump Everyday Math for the Singapore book, Primary Math. I can’t say enough bad things about it. I have written several letters to the local paper that I share on the site. I will not rest until this plague on math is eliminated from my district!
My kids school uses investigations. However, this year has been the worst. I have a 4th grader and a 2nd grader. The 4th grader is doing okay, however my 2nd grader is struggling and she is doing things this year that I do not remember her brother doing when he was in 2nd grade. Also, my 4th grader keeps bringing home assignments using “lattice multiplication”! I was clueless and so could not help him. I did finally learn it and I think it is a ridiculous procedure! I have heard of Singapore math, only through my research I have been doing into the International Baccalaureate curriculum my school district is attempting to implement. That is a whole other can of worms! I am definitely not liking the stuff I am learning about that “programme”…..
I taught using Everyday Math or about 8 years. I found that it was very hard to adjust to in the beginning since it was not the way I was taught. After struggling with it for a while, I learned that it was great for SOME of my students, but like anything – not ALL of them.
Everyday Math should be used as a resource, but not the only source for math instruction in the classroom. Your 528-263 subtraction example in your post made me laugh and cringe at the same time. But I also remember as a classroom teacher that this approach worked for many of my students. The same was true for partial quotients and partial products. I did not learn math this way, the parents of my students did not learn it this way, but it did work for a good number of my students. It just took some time to get past the “I didn’t learn it this way, therefore I don’t like it.”
I agree with the majority of your post, but I also feel that Everyday Math gets an unfair treatment due to the fact that schools do not use it properly. Schools announce that they are using Everyday Math as their math curriculum. That is wrong. Schools should use it as a resource to go along with a much bigger picture. One size doesn’t fit all.
I also believe that learning these new approaches to math made me a better teacher. It made me uncomfortable and it made me work harder to make sure each of my students was ‘getting it’.