Woke Math
I thought the constructivist math in the common core was bad. Bad math education was the main reason I pulled my kids from public school. I was so outraged that Medford public schools eliminated practice and repetition from school over a decade ago. I pitched a fit at the BOE meetings, got other parents involved and we made change. I even wrote about how bad these constructivist math programs really are. I’m strongly advising you, that if your school uses Everyday Math by McGraw-Hill Education, you need to get that child tutor or get to a Kumon.
Schools may claim that all these kids have “dyscalculia,” but really its these woke programs that never teach the kids basic skills through practice and repetition that causes many kids to fail at math.
Amazingly McGraw-Hill Education somehow managed to make public school math worse in their program “Reveal Math”, by trying to teach social and emotional skills in the middle math class. Why can’t these people just teach math? Math class is not the time to learn “social awareness.”
What Book does your school use? You should know all the materials that your child uses in their classroom.
Omg this is a nightmare! Glad we made it to high school without seeing this. One less battle we have to fight (there are so many now).
From personal experience, for my learning style repetitive math failed me. I was exceptionally good at memorizing, so when it came to more advanced concepts, I struggled. I did well enough to make it into engineering school in undergrad, but I should’ve been more conversant in the various concepts and mathematics was always a source of stress for me, not curiosity. Needless to say, I changed my major. It wasn’t until seeing my nephew’s common core concepts when I was an adult that I even began understanding how to do basic math in my head. Prior to that, I didn’t understand the language of math, I just tried to memorize it. The entire concept of solely teaching strict repetition and memorization is silly; but of course, it’s “woke” to think the existence of different learning styles should warrant schools to present a variety of methods. No one way is inherently correct or incorrect. I’ve heard Republicans says we need to take politics out of schools - but by declaring some teaching styles “liberal” and resisting offering multiple styles is the very thing that’s forcing politics into our schools. While I agree neither side has it right at this point, maybe lay off the reactionary “when I was a kid, we were just forced to sit down and and shut up and do the work” concept and stop concluding that recognizing different learning styles begets “sissies” and see it gives some kids a fighting chance. Stop bringing politics into learning.