Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Triumph of the "covertly tutored"
What does Penfield, N.Y. math champion, Jim Munch, have to say about earning a perfect 5 on his advanced placement calculus exam when the district tries to turn him into the reform math poster boy?
Jim set the record straight when he told the NY Times, "My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the [reform math] program. Whatever I’ve achieved, I’ve achieved in spite of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There’s a reason we go to school, which is that there’s someone smarter than us with something to teach us.”
Turns out "poster boy" had been “covertly tutored” in traditional math by his parents. Surprise, surprise.
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2 comments:
I have a similar situation. My seventh grader got accelerated to Algebra after a year of CMP 2.
Looks good, doesn't it? But the truth is she receives a full replacement curriculum at home, coming up on two years now.
She came up with "brand new strategies" that wowed the tester, but where did she get them from? Surprise surprise. She did not construct them herself.
They were directly taught.
What's maddening is they'd call this cheating.
I call it learning.
Direct instruction at home is what got your daugther there, but of course, they'll use this as a shining example of how fantastic CMP2 is.
We have CMP2 in our district from 6-8th grade. The Algebra option in 7th grade (Honors Math) is barely breathing.
They seem to be doing everything in their power to phase it out completely. I don't have a child in the middle school but can't imagine how this is happening with little if any resistance.
In the meantime, my kids are also receiving direct instruction at home so that they too can come up with "brand new strategies" as needed.
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