Education news just goes from bad to worse today. I just came across this article from the Wall Street Journal regarding math education. Pretty scary stuff.

See, homeschooling at our house is kinda eclectic. We have a lot of student-led learning, but there are some things we feel strongly about. Our kids know they need to master reading and math. To help our kids learn to read and to love reading, we read in front of our children (newspapers, books, and magazines, daily), we read to our children, we ask our children to read to us, and we do some instruction in how to read. Vocabulary building is done largely in context.

As far as math instruction goes, that is a mixed bag as well. I happen to think that the kids need to know their basic math facts backwards, forwards and sideways. We’ve used worksheets, we’ve used flashcards, we’ve used practical application. When Brian and I use math skills in our daily lives, we show the kids how important it is. Basic knowledge in math is non-negotiable.

The WSJ had this to say about math instruction:

The math panel’s draft report comes amid the so-called math wars raging in the nation’s public classrooms. For two decades, advocates of what has come to be known as “reform math” have promoted conceptual understanding over drilling in, say, multiplication and division. For example, to solve a basic division problem, 150 divided by 50, students might cross off groups of circles to “discover” that the answer was three. Some parents and mathematicians have complained about “fuzzy math,” and public school systems have encountered a growing backlash.

Fuzzy indeed.

My teen daugther is currently working through a math workbook. She is not too fond of it, and I can’t say I am either. For now, we are continuing with it because she has gotten to a point where her basic math skills come pretty fast–because she put in the time to memorize them–and we want to see how she applies those basic math skills. I think she could use a bit more drill to get even faster in recall, but I’m letting her disagree and do the application part. So the other day she was looking at a problem about ratio and proportion and she could not understand the example at all. I looked at it and I was not sure what the book was telling her to do either, so I went back and looked around.Then I asked her what she thought she should do. I was stalling

My daughter then took me through the steps to solve the problem in a very logical manner. She got the right answer. Then I explained how the book was instructing her to do the problem using a different system. It seemed way more convoluted to both of us, so I told her to try it for the sake of learning something new and then to check her work using the simple solution she’d already come up with.This is the beauty of homeschooling. We can take as much or as little time as we need to discover how to do something.

One other point comes to mind. I was talking with a group of friends the other day and they were saying how they can’t help their kids with their children’s math homework because the system for solving the problems is so different from the way they learned to do math in school. I think this (and other similar instances) is a way that the establishment separates children and parents. Call it a subtle indoctrination: Your parents don’t know this. We do. They can’t help you. We can.

One other beef I have with standard math textbooks is the early introduction of word problems. I think kids need a very solid foundation in math facts before they start worrying about what time the train arrives in Chicago if it left Detroit at 9 and traveled at a constant rate of 53.29 miles per hour. When kids are working overtime to decode basic sentences, they need to be decoding the sentence, not trying to integrate very shaky math skills. But that is just my opinion. I’m always messing things up in scope and sequence, like yesterday when my 2nd grader and I were working on doubling simple fractions.

The WSJ article has a brief list of basic math skills that should be mastered by grade level for those who are interested in checking a child’s progress.

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