Education Today

My daughter is in the 4th grade and has been struggling (very frustrated) with math this half of the year. Our school uses a program developed by the University of Chicago and in my opinion it is worsening the way children are learning math.

In the past month, I have kept notes regarding what she is learning from day to day, week to week. In mid-February, they switched from learning multiplication to division. They started by memorizing basic division (the tables). It hasn't come horribly easy to her, but she's working on it.

The first trouble came when the unit jumped into long division in mid-January. They still didn't have their tables memorized and this suddenly became a huge challenge to many of them. My daughter learned this odd way that I can't see how it helps and now the frustration is kicking in because she cannot understand my way and I think her way is making the paperwork and time involved triple.

So to divide 7 into 320, the kids have to guesstimate how many times 7 would fit into 320. My daughter did a problem similar to this, guessed 30 and that leaves you with 110. She then has to figure out how many times 7 fits into 110, etc. At the end, she adds all of her "guesstimates" and gets the correct answer eventually.

Most of us learned to divide 7 into 32. Subtract, bring down the 0, and continue. It is so much faster, and neater!

Anyway, a week after this assignment, they jumped to geometry and started working on triangles. A week later they were working on surveys/polls. The next week they worked on fractions. Supposedly this breaks up the boredom. Meanwhile, we are back division now, but they are learning how to turn fractions into decimals and she's utterly confused because the division wasn't enforced for long enough that she can get the problems done. Come to find out, not that it was on the homework papers at all, they are supposed to be using a calculator now until they have learned division.

Why not just learn division before you start showing children how much easier and quicker it is to use a calculator? I think it is sad that they are teaching kids to use a calculator before they are teaching them how to do the actual math.

I'm working with her now to teach her my way of division and we are working daily so that it sticks. Sadly, I know many schools started using this "Everyday Mathematics" and I don't think that this system is truly going to help children in the long run!