Trouble in Paradise

I look forward to trying to figure out the columns and rows assignment with the 11 problems over the weekend.

I should admit that I am a skeptic of the modern math movement which was introduced today in class and which is implemented in most -if not all - CCSD classrooms. In my third grade classroom right now, for example, vertices were mentioned. When a rectangle was drawn the other day, the students called it a "rectangular prism" and when they saw a square, it was called a "cube". I hope to learn in this class why they are expected to learn such concepts in elementary school. I think they should be taught! But taught in middle school or high school. This mirrors the fact that at least one school in the CCSD students recite "digraph ph" when they see "ph" and "blend bl". Why do they need to know what a digraph or a blend is? It would be much better for them to be able to use that knowledge.

Instead of having automaticity with their arithmetic, most of the CCSD students I've encountered from subbing at 25 schools and in my practicum and observations have been very lacking in their ability to do arithmetic. I went to elementary school in the 1980s. I don't remember much about math, except that I found the multiplication facts around 12 very hard to master. At some point I did get them through repeated use. Many students do know know the helpful rule about 9 x a number (9x4 = 45, 4+5 = 9, 9x8 = 72, 7+2 = 9) It's not essential, of course. At one school though students have memorized number rules and the rule numbers themselves, so they say "Rule x: 5 times any number will have 0 or 5 at the end, Rule y: 2 times any number will always end in 0 or an even number.

Some school stuff behind the read more.

My title would be extra appropriate if I actually were teaching at Paradise ES this summer, but I'm not. What I've run into this first week and a half at my school is that I'm "engaging" my students too much. My natural personality is to jump right into things and then we were also encouraged to jump in at our Practicum Orientation.

This does relate to math. Math is the subject I see every day at my school. I try to help the kids as much as possible with the work. I don't do it for them, of course. I actually was teaching some counting strategies without realizing what I was teaching the last couple of days, not as a formal lesson, but as I coached some students through problems.


Anyways, I'm blabbering on.