Georgia's state school superintendent had a press conference late Thursday where he announced his opinion that school districts should have the option of going back to traditional math. Now we wait to see if the state board concurs.
Hoo-rah.
The clunky, spiraling, grazing new math program does NOT work. Students barely grasp a new concept before they spiral away to something else. They return to that concept in another year, by which time they've forgotten how, what, and why. We've had to resort to private tutoring for our daughter, who has been a strong math student. But the spiral has caught up to her this year.
For example, her teacher spent a scant two days on intersecting slope equations. Then spent a a few more days on parallel and perpendicular equations.That's it. Time to move on. If students don't understand, it's up to them to "figure it out for yourself."
We have seen a troubling trend of poor retention of basics such as figuring percentages, remembering how to simplify fractions in multiplication and division, complete lack of understanding of negative integers, and others.
Something ain't right.
Please, please, PLEASE DeKalb Schools. Why wait for the state? Other school systems have already figured out how to dump Kathy Cox's pet math project and get back to the basics colleges expect on that almighty high school transcript.
Put traditional math back into the curriculum. Read your own scores, trending quickly downward just as they are across the state. Schedule our rising Freshmen for Algebra in 9th grade, not Math 1-2-3-4-Button-My-Shoe-Close-the-Door on mastery. Imagine the challenges facing next year's graduating class, the first in a long line of guinea pigs for this experiment, who will have to explain to out of state colleges what the heck Georgia's math program means. Understand that while you're shuffling students from one facility to another, your business is education in the classroom, a fact that I fear will get lost in that shuffle.
Do it
now, while high schools are building schedules for next year, so the staff doesn't have to redo those schedules again over the summer because your timing isn't reasonable.
It's broken. Fix it.
