Transplanting Singapore math

>The fact that it requires elementary teachers to understand math well has to be a serious obstacle.

Sigh, I’m sure you’re right, but it’s sure depressing. We’re not talking calculus here, just things like the associative property of arithmetic or long division.

A society whose teachers can’t deal with arithmetic is doomed.

–The no-frills textbooks lack teacher editions and other aids that are part of U.S. math packages such as “Everyday Mathematics.”

This is misleading at best. The Primary Mathematics series books have instructor’s guides. Other version of the textbooks have been adapted to the US market, and do have more of the typical scope-sequence pacing that American books.

But what they don’t have is inane analogies and activities where students write sentences about how they think about math. They have a lot of math. Teachers can’t just move to it with 2 days of training (or even 5 days of training), but that’s about all they get.

Many of our elementary teachers do not understand place value or the standard algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. They don’t understand the difference between division and division with remainder. And fractions and decimals are well beyond them.

Until that’s fixed, changing textbooks isn’t going to help much.

Has the writer taken a look at the textbooks and seen what it would be like to teach from them? Our school district was upgrading to a newer version of Everyday Math and kindly gave me a set of old teacher manuals, student journals, etc. The worksheets themselves aren’t problematic so long as you don’t allow children to use calculators, etc. and teach the concepts.

But the work! OH, I do not know for the life of me how public schoolteachers do it. Each lesson, you must plan ahead of time which journal to get out, which “math masters” item to xerox, get stuff out for games, etc. WHAT a pain. Much easier by far to go lesson by lesson by lesson in Singapore Mathematics. Almost never do they ask for preplanned items (EM asks for things like bread ties and straws and assorted odds and ends on a regular basis!) and the curriculum goes through step by step by step.

Done? Move on to the next lesson. Some lessons, we’d spend three or four days on. Other times, we find ourselves able to get through an entire lesson in a day.

The only relative drawback (and an easily correctable one with a weekly “review” sheet, perhaps) is that SM doesn’t do much review. Some of its English is a bit stilted (for example “pots of plant” instead of “potted plants) but it is workable.

I have zero teacher training and have been able to work with this program at home. FYI my nine-year-old is now in high school algebra…which… I failed in high school. My point being…there’s really no reason *every* teacher couldn’t do Singapore Maths. EM is doable too, but *whoo* there is a lot of planning involved and it would drive me nuts if I had to do it on a schedule. We just used some of the very excellent worksheets and left the “how do you feel about math?” type sheets blank.

But the work! OH, I do not know for the life of me how public schoolteachers do it. Each lesson, you must plan ahead of time which journal to get out, which “math masters” item to xerox, get stuff out for games, etc. WHAT a pain. … (EM asks for things like bread ties and straws and assorted odds and ends on a regular basis!),

Perhaps that is a feature rather than a bug.

1. Elementary teachers get good at making and following activity plans, especially if someone does most of the planning for them (“For the next lesson, get ____, copy ____,make sure students have _____.”). You don’t have to know the material that well.

2. It keeps kids occupied. Even in the elementary grades, a lot of school is day care.

“The fact that it requires elementary teachers to understand math well has to be a serious obstacle.”

Surprise, surprise, surprise. One has to be able understand math and perform computation to teach it well. Whowouldathunkit? Certainly not ed schools.

“The no-frills textbooks lack teacher editions and other aids…”

I taiuht for years and never once used a teacher edition or manuals. I found them either redundant or useless. But, then, I knew my subjects.

“…unless the fraction is improper (numerator is larger than the denominator), the value of a fraction will always be some value between 0 and 1 (inclusive), with the exception that the denominator cannot be zero (0), as division by zero is undefined.”

Between -1 and +1, exclusive. Both the numerator and the denominator are integers (with the restriction you mentioned that the denominator cannot be zero)

The Post article (for which I notice comments are closed; wow, that was fast!) mentions that the school had major disruption problems due to Rhee wanting to shut down the school, and it also mentions that the school didn’t stage the introduction of Singapore Math in the early grades first so that students had a basis. Sticking a fourth grader into Singapore Math after three years of Everyday Math borders on child cruelty. Singapore Math builds upon itself and by fourth grade, students have acquired various skills and concepts whose mastery has been developed upon in the three previous grades, as opposed to Everyday Math’s spiraling and exposure method of teaching math. Is it any wonder test scores went down? It also mentions Montgomery County using Singapore math “for research purposes” in 2000. Interesting that Montgomery County is spinning it that way.

Simply passing a multiple choice test is no guarantee that the teachers actually understand arithmetic. I always did well on standardized math tests because I have a good memory. But until I started using Asian-based programs in our homeschool, I had no clue *WHY* the algorithms worked. It was all rote plug-n-chug. It isn’t rocket science, but there’s much more to elementary school math than appears at first glance.

Sorry, hit enter by accident.

But no, most of you want to make the teaching of elementary school math some intensely challenging and cognitively demanding process that requires special skills that our stupid elementary school teachers just can’t manage.

Somehow, however, most of our kids show mastery anyway–even though most of them don’t have micromanaging parents (homeschoolers or not) who think their kids can’t learn a thing unless they take on the task themselves.

Our teachers aren’t that stupid. And elementary school math isn’t that hard for anyone of average cognitive ability or higher. Which means the kids of everyone posting here are just fine. Teaching math to kids of low cognitive ability is incredibly difficult–in fact, it’s arguable we don’t really know how to do it yet–and there’s no evidence that advanced knowledge of math will make *that* task (teaching low ability kids) more successful.

So many different ways for people to be either stupid, wrong, or both.

Crimson, that’s just silly. Teach your kid if you want, but if you think it’s because public schools coiuldn’t do better, you’re kidding yourself.

As for your training plan for teachers, notice that you seem to assume they aren’t motivated. Again, you’re pretty clueless about what is required for the average elementary school teacher in most states, and their understanding is adequate for what they need to do if they can pass the test.

You don’t think that’s enough? So what?

Try and keep these ideas in your mind simultaneously:

1) White and Asian kids are learning math fine. They could be doing more, but to the extent that they aren’t, it’s not teacher incompetence but fear of making the achievement gap larger that prevents this.

2) Black and Hispanic kids are not, as groups, learning math well. The reasons have little to do with teacher ability and everything to do with their average cognitive ability and, to a lesser degree, their income and interest.

Curriculum choices are highly dependent on student cognitive ability, and we refuse to recognize this. So any discussion about curriculum is a waste of time. Any discussion of teacher training is, likewise, a waste of time. We can’t really know how to train our teachers until we know who they are teaching–and, for the most part, the teacher ability and understanding they have now is doing a better than average job of teaching our top kids, so it’s not high on the list of things we need to worry about.

Thanks for the link, Joanne. We have a new post today in response to Turque’s article. http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/going-beyond-singapore-math-a-formidable-response-to-bill-turque-from-the-washington-post-681.php

Cal,

If you have any data showing that today’s elementary school teachers have adequate training in math, please share it. Let me repeat what I wrote you on an earlier thread:

“What I witnessed when I audited a math methods class at the local ed school (part of the local Ivy League university) was a majority of students who were extremely weak in math. Many, for example, confessed to getting help from their fathers, husbands, and boy friends on the weekly problems (which were at about the level of 4th-6th grade Singapore Math).”

Even at the best schools, the consequences are dire, though here, many parents have access to outside tutoring, (please note that when you bring up race and ethnicity, you must look at what’s happening, or not happening, outside the school).

Here’s some more of what I wrote you earlier:

[quote]

Take, for example, the local elementary school in my neighborhood. It is a joint collaboration with the above ed school and the city school district. Its existence has caused real estate prices in its catchment area nearly to double. Because it’s perceived as a great place to teach (among other perks, class size is capped well below the city-wide class size limits), many teachers apply. *And* the school has site selection privileges, so the principal, a former high school math teacher, can hand-pick the teachers. So you’d might think that every elementary school teacher who gets a job at this school would, in particular, have a good grasp of mathematics.

Not so.

Indeed, some teachers have been hired after confessing during their interviews
(which parents who sign up are allowed to attend) that they hate math and aren’t
good at it.

The school has also picked a terrible math curriculum:
Investigations.

The result of this is that only those children who are getting outside tutoring in math are mastering the fundamentals of arithmetic [at the level of Singapore Math--which many of them are using on the sly outside of school].

[end quote]

If you can’t do 4th – 6th grade Singapore Math problems, I suspect you can’t teach them either.

I don’t know how to break this to people, but more than a few elementary school teachers are admittedly math phobic and strongly dislike math. I’ve heard elementary level teachers in my school district openly admit that they just don’t get division or fractions.

Elementary math may not seem like rocket science to some, but for many of our elementary school teachers, the math that is taught at the 4th, 5th, and 6th grade levels is beyond their comprehension.

Singapore Math’s biggest strength – the assumption that it is taught by someone who understands math – is it’s biggest weakness here in the US because mathematical comprehension and fluency aren’t required to become an elementary teacher.

I will not try to address the Singapore debate here, other than observe that Cal’s statements are unsupported by any empirical data I am aware of (e.g., does Cal has any evidence to support her belief that the IQ of Hispanics is worse, or better, than that of the Malay minority in Singapore?)

But I wanted to share some of my first hand observations of the DC Singapore pilot program. I happened to observe it closely at the time and — among other things — participated in the monthly teacher training sessions.

It was a very difficult situation, as comes through the article too. The district curricular leadership hated the idea of Singapore math (Rhee didn’t seem to care — she was in the midst of non-curricular battles) and it just succeeded in closing the program at another poor DC school (Powell) that was actually quite successful there. Restarting it at Bruce Monroe, with all the upheaval it was going through at the time, seemed like administration’s way to prove the program cannot work.

Despite that difficult start I am glad to see that many teachers still like it. Unfortunately the extra support needed in the first years seems to have disappeared, and B-M was left to cope for itself against unsupportive district.

I personally don’t think the absence of Spanish version was an issue — the program requires rather minimal language skills and is focused on math rather than on language, in contrast to many American books. The issue was discussed a few times during the first year of implementation and teachers were quite clear on the fact they did not view it as a serious problem. Seems they use it now to explain their slow progress. Not surprising, given that the alternative is to tell the truth and blame the district administration for its lack of support, if not worse.

Another interesting point that came up in DC was the lack of scripted lesson plan for Singapore program, that was commented upon by some people here. The prior year DCPS decided to close the successful Singapore program in Powell — it replaced Powell’s previous principal (for other reasons, I was told) and the new principal was ideologically against Singapore and wanted to kill the pilot. A session was held in the summer of 2008 with the district math staff, the incoming principal, and Powell piloting teachers who, incidentally, were without exception in support of continuing the pilot. I was also present.

I should mention here that the K-2 Powell teachers (the pilot grades) generally speaking lacked strong math background. The only one with a stronger math background couldn’t attend the meeting, as she was getting married in Hawaii that same week. In the meeting both the new principal, and the district staff, attacked the Singapore program and one of their point was, in fact, this exact argument — that the Singapore program has “insufficient teacher support,” and that it “has no ready-made teacher lessons.” And this is where things turned out interesting for me.

Rather than take it as a negative, those –mathematically weak! — teachers took this exact point and argued that it was one of the main reasons why they liked the program. “When we prepare a lesson for EveryDay Math (the district’s standard program) we go every day over the printed lesson plan and we think we understand it. Then, when we get to the class, we tend to forget those quickly scanned lessons, and when we are asked a non-obvious question by one of the kids, we are generally stumped.” In contrast, they argued, “with Singapore Math we have no prepared lesson plan, but the units are longer and more cohesive. So we need to actually study the whole unit for a week or two ahead, and prepare our own plans for those two weeks rather than a day at a time. As a result, we actually understand what we are teaching and we have no difficulty to respond to kids’ question in the class.”

I was floored. I couldn’t have said it better myself. And this from what I considered mathematically-weak primary grades teachers, trying to fight a new principal and the district’s math admins. Wow.

There was little left to be said at that meeting. It was quickly wrapped up, and the teachers were promised to be notified of the decision. Not surprisingly, the decision came a few days later to kill Powell’s pilot. A month later the school year started without Singapore math (a new, independent, pilot started in Bruce-Monroe). Withing a month of school’s start the new and ideological principal quit. But the pilot was already dead.