>By CHERYL K. CHUMLEY
cchumley@manassasjm.com
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Five hundred and seventeen – that’s the number of parents and individuals as of Wednesday morning who have signed a petition to remove a math program that some call “fuzzy” from the Prince William County elementary school curriculum.
“I’m a parent of kindergarten and second-grade girls, so we’re just beginning to feel the pain,” said Alexis Miller, in reference to her eldest’s induction into Math Investigations, a new program that disdains rote memorization in favor of a more holistic, explanatory approach to problem-solving. “I tried at the beginning of the year to teach [the Math Investigations] method … and she doesn’t understand it. She gets so frustrated, she cries.”
For instance, Miller said, an actual homework assignment required her daughter show with drawings “all the different ways you can combine ones and tens to get to the number 47.”
So the finished assignment might include several pictures: One of a grouping of ten boxes as a single set, next to pictures of 37 individual, unattached boxes. Another, of a grouping of two sets of ten boxes, adjacent to pictures of 27 single boxes. And a third, of pictures of three separate sets of ten boxes, with 17 individual cubes drawn nearby – and so on, until all the possible combinations were reached. The lesson learned, according to Miller?
“It’s an exercise in futility,” she said. “I guess the goal is to frustrate. The focus is on regrouping, and I guess the thought is this is going to give some deeper understanding of the numbers.”
Other parents say they experience similarly.
“I have a second-grade daughter in Westridge, so she’s the lead guinea pig” for the program, said James Blanks. “On one homework problem she had recently, she had to determine the number of fingers and toes in her family and how she came up with that number.”
The idea, Blanks guessed, was to teach how to count by five. But the method, as well as the undefined goal of most Investigations problems, he added, leaves his daughter at a learning disadvantage and he would like to see the curriculum “completely dropped” for a more “traditional” approach that includes algorithms.
As such, Blanks has joined a list, posted at a new Web site, pwcteachmathright.com, of unhappy parents and concerned individuals who are petitioning the county’s School Board to remove Investigations from the math curriculum.
“In 2006,” the petition opens, “PWCS mandated countrywide implementation of a controversial ‘reform math’ program known as TERC Investigations in Number, Data and Space … Renowned mathematicians, university professors, engineers, scientists, parents and individuals who use, advance and rely upon mathematics in their careers and daily lives have condemned programs like TERC Investigations, which abandon teaching of proven math fundamentals to elementary school children.”
The petition, said one signer who has a third-grader at Mountain View Elementary School, will be presented to board members at the Feb. 6 meeting.
“I can see using this type of program as a supplement to help kids understand math in a different way,” said Alyson Satterwhite. “But if you don’t do the problem completely the way Math Investigations expects it to be done, you’re wrong.”
And part of the confusion, she explained, is that the system mixes math with language arts by requiring students not only solve the problem, but then explain with words how and why they arrived at that particular solution.
“It’s totally fuzzy,” Satterwhite said. “Investigations gets very wordy, and after my son solves the problem, it wants him to explain, ‘how do you know that’s the answer?’ Well, to my son, he says, ‘I just know.’ We call it touchy-feely math … and I think math needs to stay in the math department and language arts stay in the language arts department. It’s kind of hard for kids to throw adjectives at numbers.”
Satterwhite sees this math curriculum as similar to whole language programs that were popular in reading courses years ago – until it was found this means of replacing the sound-it-out style of phonics with whole-word memorization was a failed system.
From the school’s side, however, comes a long list of reasons to maintain the status quo of the elementary math curriculum.
“This is the program the educators have decided we’re going to use,” said School Board member Don Richardson, Gainesville District, “and I have confidence in that decision … We’re not going to determine our educational program by people making petitions but by the superintendent and the professionals making decisions and following it up with hard data.”
It’s premature at this point, Richardson said, to label Math Investigations a success or failure, because more time is needed for testing. In the meantime, he said, supplementation of the program should not even be considered an option because “it would skew the data to the point where you couldn’t get anything out of it,” where it couldn’t be determined if the test results could be attributed to Investigations or another math curriculum.
Moreover, Richardson said, the parental outcry with the current Investigations taught in the county’s schools stems more from perceived problems with the 2004 version of the curriculum – problems that have since been overcome in the currently used 2008 version.
The two board members with elementary school children learning the Math Investigations approach, as well as Dumfries District’s Betty Covington, were less cut and dry in their assessments of the program, though all nonetheless saw the logic with a wait-and-see attitude.
“I’m certainly very concerned parents are upset about Math Investigations,” said board chairman Milt Johns. “But we made the decision to go with the Investigations material after receiving some very compelling data from staff … and we are going to give them the respect to wait for the data” that conclusively shows whether the program is successful or not.
And Gil Trenum, the newly elected Brentsville representative who began his four-year term of office this month, had this to say: “I understand the approach of the Investigations program. I’m not overly impressed; however, I will reserve making a final decision. I think that’s only fair.”
Math supervisor Carol Knight, meanwhile, said in an e-mail that the level of public outcry for the Investigations program in no way changed her support.
It has, however, strengthened her resolve to “help parents understand the depth of the mathematics that their children will learn in using the multiple strategies that evolve from Investigations.”
One way the school systems fosters this understanding is through targeted instruction and free evening courses to teach parents how to help with Investigations homework. Aimed at promoting the benefits of the curriculum, the classes nonetheless only prove the opposite for some.
“I think if a math curriculum is constructed in such a way that you have to indoctrinate parents to understand it, there is something wrong with that program,” said Satterwhite. “At the elementary level, parents should be able to understand their children’s math homework without taking courses.”
