When one of my kids was in fifth grade, I went to a PTA night. The teacher, a nice fellow in his 60’s, thought he’d enlighten the parents by showing how they were teaching the kids division.
It was a cluster-f**k. In essence, the kids were supposed to be “seeing” everything in terms of powers of ten, but the method and notekeeping was extremely convoluted. I said, “What are you doing here? You’re trying to teach the kids to divide using synthetic division when they barely know arithmetic, and three or four years before the concepts of polynomials and synthetic division will be introduced.”
Now, this fellow wasn’t a bad guy, and didn’t care if the kids learned the traditional way at home. Many teachers aren’t so understanding.
Anyway, after the class, about a half-dozen parents came to me and thanked me for expressing succinctly and accurately what the pedagogic problem was.
This was maybe 15 or 17 years ago. I’m sure it has only gotten worse since then.
During Parents’ Night at my daughter’s elementary school many years ago, her teacher announced that she would be teaching her pupils how to do division using the German method. Our school district probably has more engineers than most so we asked her to demonstrate this method. The teacher was unable to do so.
As Ms Bagman pointed out later, what good is it to teach one solution technique one year and then learn another one the next year?
The concept of having kids wield numbers by 10s is sound. Other curriculum is actually doing that well. The problem is the common core went off the deep end with clunky implementation until a sound theory is hopelessly ruined along with the kids math ability.
My daughter is doing something in homeschool that gets place value RIGHT. Hence she can do 4 digit addition, subtraction, fractions, and a little multiplication and division and she is not yet 6. Mastery over the ‘tens’ has unlocked numbers in a big way and there is no stopping her now.
The thing is, the ‘old’ methods of math did the same thing, they just took a more circuitous route to get there. They were not overtly basing everything on tens but kids ended up getting it. Everyone raise your hand if ‘carry the one’ is burned into your math brain.
I am a product of the “New Math” of the early 60’s. To this day, I cannot state a multiplication fact without going through multiple steps. “Rote” memory was not good for us as we had to “think” about how we got to 6x8. Go to the nearest ten and count out the difference. Convoluted, confusing and totally unnecessary. This unfortunate stab at reinventing math to get kids interested is being repeated in my grandsons sixth grade class today. I am saddened for him and his mother as they struggle through hours of homework made harder by such ridiculousness. However, by my knowing that his math today is my math of yesteryear, I was able to help him understand the basis for their stupid math word questions. Common Core has nothing on this grandma. By the way, I am in accounting and am fully reliant on a calculator.