Showing posts with label Connected Math. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Connected Math. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
More Connected Math Woes, This Time in Pennsylvania
The Riverview School District enrolls about 1,100 k-12 students in Oakmont and Verona Boroughs, Pennsylvania.
From an online news blog, the Plum-Oakmont Patch
The parents had a lot of familiar things to say:
From an online news blog, the Plum-Oakmont Patch
The Riverview School Board meeting on Monday had the largest attendance in years, according to school board members. Parents filled the high school library, and in a citizen comment session that lasted two hours, they discussed their concerns about the middle school Connected Mathematics 2 program.
The parents had a lot of familiar things to say:
Eight years to find a new curriculum?
Among the parents' concerns were the group work involved, the participation aspect of the class, the frequency of testing and the combination of students at different math levels in the same classroom.
Parent Joseph Knapp said his son struggled in the class because of the way it was structured.
"I, unfortunately, found the Connected Math program to be an unorthodox way of teaching students," he said. "It seemed like the students taught themselves, in theory.
"They have groups where they figure out problems and are encouraged to come up with the ideas on their own. I thought that was ridiculous. In sixth and seventh grades, you need instruction."
Parent Tim Lazor said his son usually did very well in math class until he took the class this year. Lazor said he doesn't think the program has the support of the students or the teachers who are teaching it.
"I don't think the teachers bought into this," he said. "That's a critical component.
Superintendent Charles Erdeljac said district officials had been looking for a way to improve the math curriculum for about eight years. He said to participate in the Math and Science Partnership of Southwest Pennsylvania, the district would have to implement Connected Math 2 or MathScape—the only two programs with the National Science Foundation's "stamp of approval."Scores declined?
Hmmn I guess math is different in small-town Pennsylvania.
When asked by parents about Pennsylvania System of School Assessment Scores, principal Jay Moser said the scores of last school year's seventh graders dropped by 9 percent, according to primary figures from the state department of education.
Erdeljac said district officials are going to continue to monitor the program and data associated with it to ensure it is a good fit for students.
"On the one hand, we have to have fidelity to the program as it's intended to be taught, but on the other hand, we're Riverview," he said. "We need to find out how this program can be most successful here at Riverview…we're still in the process of making this program Riverview's Connected Math program."
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Choosing Carnival Junk Food
It’s standardized test time in Connecticut and my child will be busy participating in this painfully drawn-out process over the next couple of weeks. While I should clarify that I think testing *can* be useful for diagnostic purposes, I consider the following question from the eighth grade CMT Mathematical Applications section to be yet another example of why I find my state's manner of assessing students quite useless:
Sample Item 8-5 (Numerical): Buying Tickets
The carnival offers you two different options for buying tickets.OPTION A: 2ドル.00 per person plus 0ドル.75 per ride
OR
OPTION B: 5ドル.00 per person plus 0ドル.25 per ride
If your uncle gave you 10ドル for the carnival, which option – A or B – would you choose. Show the mathematics you used to determine your answer.
OPTION CHOSEN: _______
Explanation:
This poor excuse for a word problem is just one example of why we started homeschooling. While I’m assuming the objective of the question is for the student to show mathematically that option B is the better choice because you can go on 20 rides as opposed to only 10 rides with option A, the question does not indicate that the goal is to go on as many rides as possible. I can easily imagine any of my children (including the 8-year old) coming up with alternate scenarios that could make either option the better one. Unfortunately, I can just as easily imagine a scenario where the person responsible for grading 200 tests containing these strange open-ended mathematical responses before the end of their shift would mark their mathematically and numerically accurate answer WRONG.
Let's say the student were to choose OPTION A since he really likes to eat junk food at carnivals (just like his favorite uncle who spots him the 10ドル) but hates the rides because they make him dizzy (thereby leaving him with 8ドル to spend on food instead of 5ドル). Would that be counted as a correct answer? I would argue that either option could be the better choice depending on the objective—which was not made clear. Mathematics is supposed to be clear, precise, and accurate. This question is just silly.
These types of Everyday Math word problems (I'm being generous here by calling it a word problem) used to make me crazy when my child would come home with them in 4th grade. Now here we are in 8thgrade running in circles all over again.
Meanwhile back in Singapore children are answering this:
Hooke's law for an elastic spring states that the distance a spring stretches is proportional to the force applied. If a force of 150 newtons stretches a certain spring 8 cm, how much will a force of 400 newtons stretch the spring? (New Elementary Math 2 Placement Test)*sigh*
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
What Works Clearinghouse on CMP
CMP was found to have no discernible effects on math achievement.
Improvement index- 0 percentile points (average)
Read the full WWC report here.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Op-Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on autistic spectrum students and Reform Math
Here!
For all the talking points that Reform Math proponents deploy in response to the general criticisms, I haven't yet seen any talking points that respond to concerns about children on the autistic spectrum. Has anyone else?
Since it's well-documented--and generally agreed--that AS children require structure, direct instruction, and discrete tasks, and that many of them have the potential to excel in math, and since the education establishment's purported missions include (1) mainstreaming and (2) catering to different learning needs, I believe this is a fruitful message to keep plugging.
For all the talking points that Reform Math proponents deploy in response to the general criticisms, I haven't yet seen any talking points that respond to concerns about children on the autistic spectrum. Has anyone else?
Since it's well-documented--and generally agreed--that AS children require structure, direct instruction, and discrete tasks, and that many of them have the potential to excel in math, and since the education establishment's purported missions include (1) mainstreaming and (2) catering to different learning needs, I believe this is a fruitful message to keep plugging.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
A constructivist approach to ratios and proportion
This is a video that purports to show how questioning can be used in teaching. In it, a teacher has a series of one-on-one conversations with a boy who is working on a math problem. I recognized the problem as coming from Connected Math. There are four recipes for an orange drink, with various ratios of orange concentrate to water. The problem is to find out, for each of the four recipes, how many cups of orange concentrate and water are required to make enough drink for 240 campers. Each camper is to have 1/2 cup.
Typical of CMP, the student in the video has received minimal instruction on ratios and proportions. What's more, the problem is a multi-step one, that requires one to figure out the total amount of cups needed of orange drink, given that of 240 campers, each receives 1/2 a cup. This is not in itself hard, but given that he has minimal instruction, it is all one big jumbled mess of a problem in his mind. He has four such recipes and therefore four problems to do, but as is evident from the first dialogue, he has mushed all four recipes into one.
[フレーム]
This problem is not difficult to teach with a systematic direct approach. Singapore Math approaches it using bar s. As an example, if the recipe is 2 parts orange concentrate to 3 parts water, the 2:3 ratio is illustrated as follows:
[ ][ ] Orange drink
[ ][ ][ ] Water
There are a total of five parts that make up the orange drink. If there are 120 cups needed (1/2 cup for 240 campers = 1/2 x 240, which Singapore Math students have learned how to do in 4th grade), then each part is 120/5 = 24 cups, and then it is easy to see that the amount of orange drink is two parts, or 2 x 24 = 48 cups, and water = 3 x 24 = 72 cups.
It doesn't take a long time to teach this, and based on my experience with my daughter, the Singapore approach is quite effective and leads to extensions of the concept whereby students can set up ratos between amount of orange concentrate and total amount of orange drink.
When you view the video it is apparent that it is taking this boy quite a while, through quite a few one-on-one dialogues with the teacher. Personally, I don't know of many classrooms where a teacher is going to have that kind of time to have a one-on-one like that.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Carolyn on Connected Muck
email from Carolyn:
In person, Carolyn always says "We-he-hell." I can hear her saying it now!
We need to beseech Carolyn to come back and write beaucoup posts on Connected Muck and sundry.
Grr. We just did a Connected Muck homework project on box-and-whisker plots. The kid is supposed to look at a huge sheet of data on the length of arrowheads from several different sites (each having maybe 40 arrowheads), then derive box plots from each one of them, then derive two more box plots from new sites and compare them. Then he is supposed to do the same thing all over again for the widths of all the arrowheads, and this time the widths aren’t even in an ordered list! You’d have to be obsessive-compulsive to be willing to do all that by hand.
Do you remember how people were always talking about how adults who were taught math the old-fashioned way couldn’t understand the CMP homework? We-he-hell. I understand exactly what they’re getting after in every one of their assignments; the trouble is the goal is STUPID. What they’re usually getting after is making some connection to calculus or higher math that the kids aren’t ready to take in yet, or they are trying to get kids to think flexibly about a topic they have just then been exposed to, and haven’t learned much less mastered yet. It’s stupid. It flies in the face of cognitive science studies.
3-11-2008
In person, Carolyn always says "We-he-hell." I can hear her saying it now!
We need to beseech Carolyn to come back and write beaucoup posts on Connected Muck and sundry.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
seamless (w)holes
from instructivist:
This one's going in the Greatest Hits file. (on the sidebar)
wholes, not parts
top down teaching
whole math taught wholly
[Carolyn once said that math was "a seamless whole" inside her head,...]
I don't know if this ties in with the idea of a seamless whole, but it has occurred to me that discrete skills are needed first before one can appreciate the connectedness of math. Without these concrete skills, math is more like a seamless black hole.
This became apparent to me again when teaching a group of seventh and eighth graders brought up on EM and currently using CMP who are a tabula rasa when it comes to the simplest bits of math knowledge. They can't do any operations with fractions (e.g. change mixed numbers to improper fractions let alone addition and division), can't divide decimals, don't have knowledge of even rudimentary geometry... One wonders what they have been doing for seven and eight years.
The seventh graders are currently in the CMP stretching and shrinking stage. Their homework consisted of finding the scale factor of two rectangles the width of which goes from 1.5 cm to 3 cm. So the idea was to divide 3 by 1.5 (they can't do it because they can't divide decimals). When I tried to show an alternative way of division using fractions to demonstrate the connectedness of math (seamless whole), I ran into trouble, too. They don't have the discrete skills of seeing 1.5 as 1 1/2, then changing this mixed number to 3/2 and dividing 3 by 3/2 (they absolutely can't divide fractions and moreover don't see 3 as 3/1. It would have been spectacular to make them experience with understanding that the more complicated decimal division problem 3/1.5 virtually solves itself when you divide the respective fractions (3 divided by 3/2). Invert and multiply but they have never heard of reciprocals and how they work. The 3 cancels and 2 is left standing without much ado!
So the upshot is: they use Connected Mathematics but can't see the connectedness of math because they don't have discrete skills (skills they could have learned through drill and kill but haven't). So to them, math is a seamless black hole from which not even light can escape.
This one's going in the Greatest Hits file. (on the sidebar)
wholes, not parts
top down teaching
whole math taught wholly
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)