Illinois math program

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Personal Statement: Please include a personal statement as part of your online application. The only exceptions will be for those applicants exempt from the English requirement for admission or those applicants coming with at least 2 years of fellowship support from an external source. But on her desk was a secret weapon: a stack of worksheets -- the antithesis of constructivist math -- pages of classic problems in long division, the addition of fractions and reducing the sum of fractions to its simplest terms.

Sun-Times columnist Mary Laney wrote this in her column for March 21, : "Recently a group of parents from suburban Wilmette asked me to meet with them.

Math is taught by 'The Trailblazers Math Program. The parents are angry and frustrated. I can understand why. Those I met with said they couldn't even read the Trailblazers' math book -- and that includes a parent who was a teacher. Trailblazers is in the genre of a new 'new math. He brought his math homework to me and together we worked on the problems. The next day when he returned from school he couldn't wait to see me. I have compassion for the Wilmette parents as they struggle to help their children learn a math system that they say is hurting their preparation for high school.

The problem is not with the teachers, say the parents, the problem is with a school board that has programs that are not working and stays with them. My daughter was a victim of Math Trailblazers and despite the research I showed the district, onward they marched. It was and still is pathetic. She went from loving math to thinking she stunk. My [two children] attended Wilmette school district and received their math instruction via Trailblazers.

It took me a few years to realize that they were not getting any worthwhile math instruction. At that time, I obtained a math book and homeschooled them. Unfortunately, it was not enough. The precious time in which they should have received 'rote' instruction was hard to make up. They do not know math as well as they could have if they were actually taught to do math.

Please do not use Trailblazers because the program does not teach math. In fact, it negatively impacts high school math scores and future career choices that require math in college for the simple reason that children did not learn math in their early academic years and did not have the foundation to build on. Please do not be sold on all the hype that the publishers try to put out. Let's keep in mind that the greatest generation did not have Trailblazers but they knew how to function mathematically!

It is something that many of the young people cannot do today. We need to ask ourselves a question as to wheather we want children to have only fun and 'concepts' or wheather we actually want them to know math.

I think that the answer is pretty obvious. As fuzzy math goes, it is not one of the worst, but it is decidely mediocre. This is our very detailed review of SFAW Math, looking at the dumbed-down methods, deemphasis of algorithms and unnecessary complexity of the series' approach to math, as well as its clutter and visual chaos, political correctness and time-wasting sidebars.

The presentation was cluttered by all sorts of cartoon characters and sidebars that would only serve to distract the student. We asked SF-AW what the differences were, and they told us this: The program ["Mathematics"] was a new program; not an update of the ["Math" program]. The top ten differences between the programs are listed below. Expanded Research Base and Validation 3. Structured Instruction step by step modeling 4.

Instant check system tied directly to intervention 5. Leveled problem solving 8. Reading and Writing for Math Lessons 9. Ongoing Professional Development More student support in the student edition We'll be working to try to find out more about this change. One teacher posted May these comments on a message board: "My old school district has it.

The first quarter was a disaster for the kids as the teachers followed the fuzzy portion of it. Then in the second quarter they dropped the fuzz, kept to the more traditional part of the program and the kids rebounded My opinion: [EnVisionMath] tries to reconcile the two approaches, reform and non, which in my opinion are not reconcilable.

Although it has not slithered into Illinois as much as it has in other areas around the country, it may pop up from time to time. The website includes a printable flyer DOC to help in fighting Investigations math, three radio ads! It contains reports on battles in a number of districts. In reponse to that, a survey was conducted among the school districts cited. I'm not particularly interested in that issue so much as I am the fact that Sidwell uses Investigations in Number, Data and Space , one of the NSF-sponsored atrocities that passes as a math course and grossly underprepares students for math.

If Mr. Obama's girls don't happen to learn math very well, his advisors will assure him it's just fine. I can't help but wonder, however, if Michelle Obama's mother, who will be living with the Obamas, will notice anything strange. Something tells me she won't like that the kids don't know how to add, subtract, multiply or divide.

If she's like many parents in this country who are similarly disturbed by such results, she'll supplement their education by teaching them the traditional way and no one will be any the wiser. In fact, Sidwell and other schools will attribute such success to their fine curriculum. In the meantime, however, those children not privy to help from parents, grandmas, tutors, or education centers will continue to remain on the low side of the achievement gap -- that stubborn problem that simply won't go away.

For those unfortunate few in the privileged class who do not get such help -- because their parents don't see anything wrong, perhaps their lower scores will help narrow the gap, but don't worry.

They will still manage to have their place in the sun. Which brings us back to those who are not so privileged. All for the want of a solid mathematics foundation. This review discusses how TERC handicaps kids when it omits standard computation methods, omits standard formulas, and omits standard terminology. The ostensible purpose of the site is to support the use of TERC, but many of the messages posted on the discussion board should raise alarm bells.

Here are some excerpts from posted messages: "I am shocked that parents allow this curriculum. The parents have flipped out over this. The parents of my district One began to draw circles on the paper as a way of solving this problem. When they were helped past this point and reached a division problem divided by 5 , they came to a halt and sat staring at the page. It was a disaster The teachers are hesitant to say anything because of politics These students are not learning disabled but rather Curricula Disabled.

But the worst is parents don't speak up. They just pay for the tutors, if they can and if they can't they try and justify it. And the districts make the parents look like their crazy if they speak up. Thank God that a Kumon has opened in our area. My daughter will be sending him over the summer.

At least I now have some credibility in my daughter's eyes. She seemed to think I had fallen off the deep end because I have been so passionately against fuzzy math. Now she knows!! The review assigns an "F" grade to this program for this grade. The "Overall Evaluation" says, "There is nothing to recommend about this program. The use of this program in our public schools is a strong argument for vouchers. The "Overall Evaluation" says, "This program received the lowest overall rating of the fifth-grade programs in this review.

The level of achievement supported falls far short of the expectations in this review. This program cannot be recommended for use in fifth-grade classrooms. Fifth grader Madeline shows us vivid examples of the differences between the fuzzy math program that she used in her old school TERC Investigations and the mastery math programs Saxon Math [original] and Singapore [Primary Mathemetics] she now uses. After viewing this, ask yourself, which do you want for your own children? This source includes numerous links, not all included here, on parent and teacher comments about Connected Math, coverage of many local battles all over the country, as well as professional critiques of the program and evidence that has been used to support it.

Also go to the programs review page at Mathematically Correct, and search on that page for a keyword such as "connected".

James Milgram. This is a wonderfully detailed and thorough analysis of Connected Math, approximately 22 pages in length. If your district is considering CMP, get this! The whole theme of ed reform seems to be 'work harder and learn less'. How can any of you [on our school board] sit there and say with a straight face that you think this stands for excellence in education?

Why in the world would anybody deliberately design mathematics that omits the most basic skills and concepts? This gasp-inducing error turns out to be merely a surface symptom of the CMP curriculum's paramount, underlying flaw: a nonchalance about -- no, outright hostility towards -- the precision, coherence, and content of mathematics as an academic discipline worthy of study in its own right. Throughout the booklets, CMP students are asked to do a great lot of group 'investigation' into otherwise classic math topics.

But those topics are never explicitly defined as such, and the standard algorithms they involve are never introduced. Is whole-number factorization into primes - the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which CMP only implicitly establishes with 'experiments' proposed for sixth grade - an inviolable principle?

The booklets do not say. And they are silent by design. CMP's teacher manuals advise a passive approach to pupils because 'showing them how to do something' only produces an 'impression' of success. Parents are then warned not to fill in the gaps: 'It is important that you do not show your child rules or formulas for working with fractions,' for example. Better that kids just figure it out.

Or fail to. Having read this far, you have no doubt reached the not unreasonable conclusion that Connected Mathematics is a pedagogical disaster waiting to happen. You will therefore be distressed to learn that it has already happened; CMP is widely used in public schools across America. Plano report on Connected Math : includes numerous reports on the battles in Plano and nationally over Connected Math. Focusing on the "big" ideas of mathematics, Connecting Math Concepts teaches explicit strategies that enable students to master difficult ideas such as ratios, proportions, probability, functions, and data analysis.

Detailed explanations and guided practice move students toward independent work, ensuring that students gain success and confidence as mathematical thinkers. Hill and Thomas H. Excerpt from the abstract: " This conclusion is statistically very robust The grades these students earned in the mathematics courses they took are also below average The plan is required, said math teachers, because many students are failing or advancing with little understanding of the concepts.

Louis Also go to the programs review page at Mathematically Correct, and search on that page. Excerpts: "With regard to mathematics content, this program does not sufficiently address the content standards and applicable evaluation criteria to be recommended for adoption. Most of the program is below the specified standards level and there is too much of an assumption that work will be done in teams. Although the publisher claims that all standards are met, several are clearly not met and several more identified herein as met are, in fact, not adequately met.

Finally, there is a systemic misconception as to what is meant by logical argument in mathematics. Almost all of the mathematical content is at the level of the Grade 7 standards or below, e. The worst of all, however, is not teaching the power of algebra itself. This is not algebra and it is not college preparatory math, no matter what it calls itself. Eventually, Volume 2 starts teaching some algebra but it is too little and too late.

A teacher in District 87, Bloomington, IL, brought this to our attention when she wrote to us to say, "In my opinion, this series has been a dismal failure in teaching math. The "Overall Evaluation" says, "This low rating reflects weakness in content, weakness in presentation, and weakness in student work as discussed immediately above and in each of the content topic reviews. It is not possible to recommend this book to anyone for any purpose.

Braams, Ph. I have found it useful sometimes to show a Grade 9 or Grade 10 IMP text to mathematician colleagues that are a bit skeptical about the Math Wars: it shows them immediately that there is a real issue here. IMP Grade 9 has stories on every page, and one has to turn many pages to find as much as an equals sign in arithmetic, never mind an algebraic expression.

It represents the degenerate extreme of NCTM mathematics.