One of my biggest complaints with Everyday Math is the lack of practice. The publisher claims that the games and fact triangles provide enough practice to get students to automaticity, but reality differs. If you haven’t seen this with your child, ask any parent with a third or fourth grader. The games and triangles only matter if the teacher (or a parent) conscientiously uses them. The games don’t get done because of lack of time. One teacher told me that to do a good job with EDM, which she likes, you need 90 minutes a day. In case you didn’t know, math class is sixty minutes long, less a few minutes at the start and end for settling in and changing.
AN ASIDE: Speaking of games, must everything be fun for students in order for them to want to or actually absorb something? As we tell our daughter, “one of your jobs is to go to school.” School isn’t all fun and games; some of it has to be work.
The common philosophy among American parents seems to be that you are either good at math or not, and no amount of work is going to change that. If you believe that, look at the relative results of the white students versus the Asian students in Greenwich. The Asian philosophy (which I experienced first-hand while living in Tokyo and travelling to Hong Kong and Singapore) is that hard work (practice, practice, practice) will overcome almost any shortcomings. Are we as parents and teachers afraid to make our children work? My mom sure wasn’t!
So which philosophy is right? I refer you to an article by Daniel Willingham, which I referred to in a previous post:
For a more in-depth discussion, read his book, Why Don’t Students Like School? (published by Jossey-Bass, 2009). He elaborates on three cognitive principles that have a direct bearing on this question:
1. “Factual knowledge precedes skill.
2. Proficiency requires practice.
3. Intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.”
Dr. Willingham comes down firmly on the side of the Asian philosophy.
BACK TO OUR MAIN POST: A previous post has shown the scarcity of practice of multiplication facts. Everyday Math is renowned (infamous) for spiraling back to a topic over and over again, but the real number of practice problems is actually small because there are only a few on each page.
Fortunately, some teachers recognize the issue and assign fact practice (every night in my daughter’s case) or provide additional in-class or take-home assignments. Some teachers may not realize the need, or some parents may not have their children do the practice. So how much is enough to get the student to mastery or automaticity? (Ever notice how the jargon words keep getting longer?) Probably more than you think. My daughter can go through the flash cards at about one every two-three seconds (when she focuses and when I can turn them that fast enough), and she has no problem making change in Monopoly®. Is it automatic yet? No. Will we continue to practice? Absolutely. Dr. Willingham argues that you need to practice beyond mastery, in order to retain the knowledge required to progress to higher learning effectively. Concert pianists still practice scales, right? Derek Jeter still practices fielding? Automaticity at work.
I will leave you with a quote from Dr. Willingham’s article: “Don’t let it pass when a student says ‘I’m just no good at math.’ We hear it a lot, but it’s very seldom true. It may be true that the student finds math more difficult than other subjects, but with some persistence and hard work, the student can learn math – and as he learns more, it will get easier. By attributing the difficulty to an unchanging quality within himself, the student is saying that he’s powerless to succeed.”
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