ALGEBRA REVISITED BY MARY MCGARR:

ALGEBRA REVISITED    By Mary McGarr

When my sons were at Memorial Parkway Junior High many years ago, they were enrolled in algebra in the eighth grade. At that time there were two sections of algebra in the eighth grade. Recall if you will that MPJH at the time was the junior high with students who had the highest scores on standardized tests.

Since there’s an engineer in our family, what didn’t get taught at school, got taught at home every night when we helped our children with their homework. For those without a mathematician in the family, our kids spent lots of time on the phone teaching concepts to their friends. Math was serious business at our house, and the actual learning of it was important to all of us.

Our oldest son ran into some difficulties with the teaching process. When he came home with a B one six weeks, my husband decided to go with me to the school to inquire about the reason. (I had learned what every parent needs to learn and that is that dads get better responses from principals than moms do.)

Our complaint was that on the six weeks exam, in answer to a question about “What did we do in class last Friday?” my son had answered “Nothing.”

The teacher took exception to that, and on a ten item test gave him a B which wrecked his average.

As it turned out, when questioned by the principal in front of the teacher regarding his answer, my son pointed out that the class went to an assembly that period and that they had indeed done nothing! The teacher wanted my son to say that he had “gone to an assembly.” The principal actually made the teacher re-average his grade!  (And while it took her several minutes to "re-average" his grades, my husband did that in his head, looking at her gradebook upside down!)

We still laugh about that!

My second son did not get off so easy. He had the misfortune to be in an algebra program that embraced the standards put forth by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Go to (http://standards.nctm.org/document/appendix/numb.htm ) to see the fuzzy thinking that this group espouses. These standards are the epitome of teaching process instead of knowledge.

Although I complained bitterly about the program, the methods of the teacher, and the overall thrust of the program, I got nowhere, and we enjoyed the worst year possible with my husband teaching algebra every night while my son protested that his father's methods weren’t the way the teacher was doing them.

The point of this article is not to tell you about my family’s problems, but to point out that then, and apparently even now, the teaching of algebra in our school district is not what it should be.

Do these practices sound familiar? Are you as a parent fighting with your child every night because of the methodology and curriculum being used in our school district's algebra program? (And by now, many parents of algebra students have themselves been taught this mess, and they have no idea that something is indeed very screwy.)

The books that are used have been designed so that more attention is paid to how your child “feels” about algebra than how much he “learns” about algebra. [If your child has an "Everyday Math" textbook for his class, he is in BIG trouble!]

Courses have been extended so that algebra takes two years for some students. Such an eventuality was objected to by me as a school board member. If students have adequate elementary school math instruction, they can learn algebra in one year. The elementary instruction is key and is a major part of the problem. When students do not learn math tables, when they cannot figure out how to find the square root, when they cannot do these manipulations in their heads, when they cannot work with fractions or do long division or work with a decimal point by the time they get out of the fifth grade, they are doomed to failure in their math education.

The emphasis on “problem solving” which is one of those educatorese words that means mostly nothing (but serves to fool parents who think they are talking about “word problems”) is the culprit and responsible for the demise of math ability in our public schools.

The current curriculum is more concerned with teaching children “how” to learn instead of teaching “what” to learn. Consequently students are rewarded with good grades if they get the “process” right even though the answer is wrong!  Anyone want to fly on an airplane with a pilot who knows “HOW” to calculate altitude but doesn’t quite get the right answer?

So here is what students get in an algebra classroom these days. It hasn’t changed in over twenty years! Work is assigned. The teacher has as a crutch an overhead projector (always ask for a transfer when you see a teacher who cannot teach without one of these) so the teacher doesn’t have to get out of his chair. Students are allowed class time to work on the problems. Students go home and try to find a parent, neighbor, friend, enemy, garbage collector -- anyone who can help with understanding. Students spend many hours on the phone seeking help or giving it. The next day, students hand homework papers to the person sitting behind them, and the teacher gives out the answers to the problems (she having the "Teacher Workbook" complete with answers) and the students grade each other’s papers.

[Updating my message:  now instead of an overhead projector, there is a television or computer screen or a Smart Board or IPad or some other worthless but expensive device in its place.]

NO TEACHING OCCURS!!! No explanations are given. No “board work” happens. The teacher has no idea what the students understand, have mastered, or need to repeat. The teacher assigns another homework assignment and the process starts over. End of class.

Is it any wonder that our children have problems with math? View this process as a way to dumb down your child and for our country to say "we don't have math smart people, so we need to import them from China and India!"

I fought this battle in 1988 and again while I was a school board member. A poor algebra program is a huge disservice to our mathematically apt students. By the time the students in my son’s eighth grade algebra class got to twelfth grade calculus, over half of them had dropped out of the advanced math program.

What a waste of human potential.

If our school district needs to send our teachers back to college to learn algebra/geometry/calculus so they can teach it to our children, then that’s what they need to do. I'm willing for my tax dollars to go toward such an effort.

Good resources for more information on math programs may be found at http://www.nychold.com/  and http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com/

I would also refer you to John Saxon's math textbooks.

You may also skip down to Numbers 12 and 13 in the index for more on the implementation of Fuzzy Math in Katy ISD schools.