Parent Pundit

A parent's letter about Everyday Math

Dear Parent Pundit:

You have a great web site.  I posted a response to your January 25^th article previously. My son went through his first year of EM last year (4^th grade, Springfield Public Schools Springfield, MO) with miserable results. I got him supplemental traditional math material and worked nearly every weekday for an hour or two all summer with him just to make up for the EM mess. He currently does Saxon Math 5/6 in parallel to his EM at school. He does 3 or 4 lessons a week.

As my post says, going into 4^th grade (prior to any exposure to EM) he tested out in the top 70% nationally (above his grade level). At the end of 4^th grade he had dropped to below 40% nationally and tested out at second month 4^th grade equivalency level. After this summer working like crazy to catch up, drills etc., he is back in the top 65% and in the first week of fifth grade tested out at 6^th month 5^th grader capability. It burns me up that his accomplishment will be used as evidence EM is working great at educating our kids.

I have written letters to my local newspaper that have been published. They even interviewed me and did a front page article that was fairly balanced. On the heals of that article, however, they published another half page response that basically called me and anybody that was against EM a kook. I have pretty much given up the fight locally. With a full time job, domestic duties, and teaching my son Saxon I am worn out. Honestly it’s amazing the lack of outrage, or for that matter even interest, parents have in this community with regard to EM. Perhaps it will take five or six years before it sinks in what the damage is.

Thanks for publishing your web site. I enjoy it.

Regards,

Stewart

Everyday Math Exposed: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Reverses Course

My daughter, as most of you know reading this blog, had HUGE problems with Everyday Math, which is an "investigative" math curriculum that doesn't teach traditional algorithms.

Well, she is now in 8th grade, and guess what her math homework is for the first week of school? How to do:

• Long Division
• Short Division
• Traditional Multiplication
• Traditional Multiplication with fractions

Why? Because most students only know the lattice method (an unwieldy method that takes up lots of paper and leaves room for numerous mathematical errors) and can only do division with calculators.

Because I used the online program Aleks to help her catch up in the 6th grade, she was far ahead of most others in her class and tested into high math for 7th grade. (She is actually in "high middle" math this year due to a death in the family, my not having her do Aleks outside of class last year(she needs the traditional methods in order to excel, and her school system doesn't use them still), and more that I don't want to go into. Only one other student in her "high middle" math class also knew the traditional manner to complete equations, and, guess what, he also got bumped from high math. (My guess is that he learns like my daughter and his parents didn't make him do his Aleks either.)

There is a teacher in her school who was a civil engineer in a former life, and she alerted the 8th grade teacher that these skills needed to be taught. (It was the people who actually worked with math who were the most vocal about "fuzzy math" curricula in the first place. The  folks in the "teacher colleges" were the ones who advocated the fuzzy math, not the mathematicians.)

Kids in high math and who excel in math, if I had to place a bet, are being tutored outside of school at a rate that is unprecedented. Of course, no school district would have the guts to do a survey to find this out.

We have a lost generation of math students and tests are now showing that and the establishment is reacting.

According to the September 12 edition of the Wall Street Journal:

The nation's math teachers, on the front lines of a 17-year curriculum war, are getting some new marching orders: Make sure students learn the basics.

In a report to be released today, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which represents 100,000 educators from prekindergarten through college, will give ammunition to traditionalists who believe schools should focus heavily and early on teaching such fundamentals as multiplication tables and long division....

The report wants kids to learn long division in 5th grade and multiplication with decimals and fractions in 6th grade. Our school children are getting those things in 8th grade. Better late than never. Folks, PLEASE remember, we would have never found out about these fundamental problems without TESTS!

Infuriated parents dubbed it "fuzzy math" and launched a countermovement. The council says its earlier views had been widely misunderstood and were never intended to excuse students from learning multiplication tables and other fundamentals.

My kids never learned their multiplication tables from school. They learned them at home, once I realized, because of the state test, that there was a problem.

Furthermore, this revelation that has happened in the 7th and 8th grade may not have trickled down into the earlier grades yet. My son is told that he MUST use the lattice method for multiplication. The lattice method is USELESS except as a mental exercise. As a parent, this situation forces me to say that the school isn't always correct in what and how they teach. I really don't like to do that so early in their educational careers, but I must.

While the article talks about a Terc math program based out of MA called Investigations in Number, Data and Space, Everyday Math is also a "fuzzy math" program used in lots of other MA communities, especially the affluent communities. These affluent communities can pay for tutoring. However, a lot of the "at risk" kids have been saddled with this fuzzy math with little or no at home help from parents. The article points to one town in MA with a lot of at risk kids that does use the traditional math curriculum, Singapore Math, and the results are spectacular. Revere didn't focus on what ed schools said was best; they focused on what worked for their population. I applaud them for going against the education "groupthink" and putting the needs of the kids first.

Additional posts here:

• If your school has Everyday Math (first post on math)
• More on How to Help Kids with Math: Math Tutoring (second post)
• More on Math... Math Sense: Stage 3 Help (third post)
• More Parents Find Out About EveryDay Math (fourth post)

Now, I want to make a few things clear. First, tests should be used to improve things and not bash things -- but to improve things you need to go back to the kids who don't have the basic skills needed and do some remediation. Second, of course curriculum should have open ended questions, but these should be after they learn the basics. You shouldn't expect kids to come up with "how to multiply" on their own.

Oh, and the same thing is happening with grammar in the schools. They don't teach it. Furthermore, they teach spelling in the most helter skelter manner when there are programs like this around, Word Web Vocabulary, that is based on learning the roots of words, the "rules" that can then be extended, kind of like phonics versus sight reading, or traditional math versus "fuzzy math."

Middle School Grammar Help Needed!

I have concluded that the schools don't even attempt to teach grammar anymore so that it will be mastered for the long term. They describe grammar, they give out worksheets ABOUT grammar, but they don't give ANY worksheets so the students can actually practice grammar. In other words, let's figure out how to do grammar in a conceptual manner and, voila, every kid will be able to create sentences in the "correct" manner.

HELP!

I found www.aleks.com to fix the problems with math, but I'm looking for a program like this to help with grammar. I could get out my old Katharine Gibbs Handbook of Business English, but it doesn't come with any worksheets. Furthermore, the hierarchical model of aleks combined with the ability to have instant feedback just works! And if you get the concept by getting it correct five times, Aleks moves you onto the next concept so no one is doing mindless rote because it moves as quickly as the individual moves.

Anyone have any ideas?

Cell Phone Fraudulent Billing – You could be a target…

Like a good daughter, I went and got my 72-year old mother a cell phone. I would teach her how to use it, and she would always be able to call. I added her to our family plan with Sprint. Little did I know that she would soon be the victim of text messaging spam and that SHE WOULD BE CHARGED FOR THAT VERY SAME TEXT MESSAGING SPAM!

It all started out innocently enough. Sprint issued my mother a new telephone number. Soon after, she received a text message that went something like this:

SMS.ac Fact: It is estimated that on average, there are 61,000 people airborne over the USA at all times. True or False? Stop? Reply STOP FACT

I looked at this and immediately thought to myself,

• first there was fax spam,
• then there was email spam,
• now there is text messaging spam.

They must dial random numbers and see if people respond. I told my mother to ignore it because the absolute worst thing you can do is respond to email spam, especially unsolicited email spam, and this “sms.ac fact” appeared unsolicited on my mom’s phone.

My daughter was in the room and she said, “Mom, I already responded “STOP.”

I told her that proved my point, the messages had obviously not stopped.

What you know about email spam does not extend to text messaging spam as I soon found out after hours of phone calls.

She received some more text messages and I deleted the slew of them without looking at them. My mom couldn’t even use the phone to call my cell phone correctly; there was no way that these were responses to text messages that she sent. (This was confirmed by Sprint. My mother did not send text messages.)

Soon, she started receiving more text messages.  She told me it was very annoying to have the phone ring all the time and then see this SMS.ac.  It even rang in the early morning hours.   I finally had time to look into it and I found the following message buried in with other inane messages:

SMS.ac Account Update: you’ve spent $5 at a cost of .25 per msg. To modify your services please visit SMS.ac on the web.

What the heck was this? Another scam for me to put my personal information onto SMS.ac when we had never signed up to SMS.ac in the first place?

I then looked at our first bill, which had just arrived. I wasn’t happy. Here is a list of text messaging charges:

Notice a couple of things. It doesn’t say who the charges are from. Contrary to the SMS.ac text messages, it isn’t in increments of $5, and it isn’t subtotaled as a separate charge. It is mixed in with a credit for activating a new line.

So, after my handy math calculations, I was charged $15.19 and .56 cents of that was tax. But at the very least, I was charged $14.63 from someone for premium text messaging that my mom never used or signed up for.

I was soon on the phone with Sprint. First, I talked to one rep who said that sms.ac was a sister company (another rep told me that was untrue) and put me in touch with the Sprint fraud department. I have never in my life had a harder time getting through to a person because not ONE OF THE OPTIONS FIT MY CASE! Furthermore, there was no way to get to a person; everything was electronic.

Needless to say, I wasn’t in a very good mood after that, and the second rep that I called hung up on me. She was clueless when I tried to tell her that I shouldn’t have to pay for these fees, and when I tried to tell her that I shouldn’t pay the Sprint fees for text messaging on top of the sms.ac fees that had been fraudulently charged, she couldn’t grasp what I was trying to say.

On the third or fourth rep, I finally got the Sprint fees rescinded, but I had to go through SMS.ac itself to get the other fees back. Sprint would shut off my phone if I withheld the text messaging fees.

Furthermore, it was impossible for me to get a complete list of what SMS.ac charged me from Sprint or WHAT THEY WERE PLANNING TO CHARGE ME NEXT MONTH.

I was livid.

I turned off ALL text messaging functionality on my mom’s phone because of this. However, it turns out, in a disaster, the only thing that does work is text messaging. My choice: hours of billing problems because of text messaging versus the possibility of a disaster where text messaging will be needed. As a customer, I shouldn’t have to make this choice. The final pebble on the scale was that my mom probably wouldn’t be able to use the text messaging, even in a disaster, but I could be wrong. And it will take years for this scamming to be fixed.

I finally got in touch with SMS.ac. I was in the process of leaving a message and telling them that I was going to write this whole sordid mess on my blog when someone picked up.

They tried to explain the business model, and I still don’t get it, and frankly, I wasn’t interested in exploring their site to find out more.

I told them my mom was either the victim of identity theft or the phone hadn’t been “cleared” when they reissued the number to my mother. They asked me if I knew of this specific person and mentioned a name. I said that I had never heard of her, and that I had just activated the phone for my mother, and if this billing had been going on for a while, then the person who was still using this service from the web site hadn't shut the service off. I told them that I was going to withhold the funds from Sprint, and they reiterated what Sprint said. They said they would refund the money and they sent me a refund form via email when I gave them my email address.

Well, remember the Sprint fraud division telephone tree hell? We now have the SMS.ac email form hell.

First, the form, issued to username luckygurl1987, who I have never heard of but who was obviously the culprit in this mess as the original signee onto the account, said that you would be only refunded a maximum of 50 text messages. I thought that this was just a form and wouldn’t apply in my case. Boy was I wrong  -- at least for now.

Second, while they did have a pulldown for phone number reissued so they must have had this problem in the past, they only allowed for number of text messages received. I had deleted slews of text messages unread. I had no idea how many text messages I had received and they didn’t have any text box to put in additional comments. So I said 100 messages thinking that should cover any new messages that I hadn’t been billed yet, and I followed up with an email that said:

Look, I don't know what you billed Sprint. The  Refund Case Number is:xxxxxx. My 72-year old mother's phone was activated on June 17. ALL charges from June 17 onward should be credited to the account.

You should also have a text input field in the refund request box that lets people put in when their phone was activated so you can figure out what was owed. It is impossible for customers to figure that out.

I had the refund go to my husband's paypal; account, xxxxxx@xxxxx.net. I'll be checking it.

Katherine Prouty

This was the emailed response from sms.ac

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us.  At SMS.ac, customer service is our passion so we love hearing from our customers.

In addition to offering daily FREE Messages to send from the SMS.ac website to a mobile phone, SMS.ac offers premium services such as Mobile Friends Network Notifications, smsChannels, smsClubs, Blind Date, and smsRewards Notifications.  Premium services are not part of our free service.

During registration, users are asked to read the Terms and Conditions.  One cannot continue with registration without agreeing that they have in fact read the Terms and Conditions.  This agreement is as follows:

I realize that I am joining a community of mobile phone users. I agree to the T&C's below and service info on the right, especially sections titled “How  much does it cost” and “New and modified functionality”. It contains important information regarding messages from community members that can include charges on your mobile phone account. Read it!

If members wish to only use their daily FREE messages and do not want to receive premium messages, which they may be charged for, they can log into their account and opt-out of receiving premium messages at any time.

SMS.ac also provides a mobile command at the end of each premium message, which the user can use to discontinue that type of message.  SMS.ac customer support is available 24 hours per day, seven (7) days per week, via telephone, live chat, and e-mail.

Thanks again for contacting us.  We hope you consider SMS.ac the next time you are looking for high quality mobile data services.

 
We value your opinion!  Please take a moment to tell us how we’re doing. Click Here!
Warm regards,

Yi-Chen Jenny Ho
Customer Support Specialist
SMS.ac
www.sms.ac
jho@corp.sms.ac
Office: +1 (619) 696-1300

So, now SMS.ac is telling me that my mother signed up for this service and actually signed the terms and conditions!   This is, of course, not true.  My mother never signed up for anything to do with her new phone.

They issued a paypal credit of $13, which was received, and Paypal got their .56 cents in fees, so they actually did only refund 50 text messages. So, right now, trying to get this straight,

I am out:

• $14.63 in sms.ac fees for premium text messages;
• .56 cents in taxes on those same fees (which I will never get back because the refund came through Paypal)
• total $15.19

Received back

• $13 minus 56 cents in paypal fees.

So my net loss so far is $2.75 IF Sprint actually issued me a credit and I’m not billed anything else from SMS.ac on next month’s bill.

And I am also out hours and hours of my time trying to fix something that was NONE of my or my mom’s doing.  My mother is less than pleased with her new phone because of the constant interruptions from these text messages which she kept receiving.

If you have kids or parents or you become a victim yourself, be prepared. They should have some form of “clearing” phone numbers of all previous obligations by date, or they shouldn’t be allowed to bill to those same phone numbers. Period.

I’m sending a copy of this to Sprint, sms.ac, my attorney general, and the Better Business Bureau. Please link to it often to let others know.

Update: Just spent another 45 minutes on the phone with a Sprint rep on a bad connection from India because I sent a link to this post to Sprint since they only allow 1200 characters. The Sprint rep had me verbally go over everything again because he couldn't click the link to read this full explanation of what went wrong. He ALSO THOUGHT THAT SOMEONE HAD SIGNED UP FOR THE SERVICE USING MY MOTHER'S PHONE!

Not only does the customer have to figure things out, but the customer has to tell Sprint how to debug it. I finally got so fed up I told him to trace the number and LOOK AT THE PREVIOUS PERSON'S BILL to see if they had these premium text messaging charges. Finally the rep woke up and said he would investigate and the scenario that I described might be a possibility. It turns out there were more charges on my next month's bill that I haven't seen yet. This is just a nightmare.

More Parents Find Out About Everyday Math

Great article about Everyday Math.

Stanford math Professor R. James Milgram although less critical, said the district is "taking a huge risk" with EM. Among whole math programs, EM is the best, he said, but teaching the program correctly would demand someone who’s majored in math at a top university.

"It just doesn’t work for typical teachers," he said.

According to Milgram, the root of the problem is that universities, which produce the nations’ teachers, generally are disconnected from professional mathematicians and scientists.

"They don’t listen to us because we’re not the ones they’re educated by," he said.

But the U.S. government is listening, because the stakes in this math war are high. The nation’s economic future hangs in the balance: the U.S. is producing less of the world’s technology and innovative products when compared to other developed countries, Milgram said. He’s part of a newly formed national board that advises Congress on such matters and supervises the Institute of Education Sciences, which provides information to the Department of Education on the effectiveness of programs and practices that improve academic achievement.

"There’s concern in Washington that we’re just not matching up," said Milgram.

As for the department calling EM "promising," Milgram said that label was withdrawn a couple of years ago.

"District after district, the outcome is abysmal," he said of math programs such as EM.

Recently, Cobasko sent Milgram a video of EM being taught in a CVUSD classroom. "From looking at the video," Milgram said, "the teachers in your district are not qualified to teach EM."

Please read the whole thing!

Here are a series of posts on math:

If your school has Everyday Math (first post on math)

More on How to Help Kids with Math: Math Tutoring (second post)

More on Math... Math Sense: Stage 3 Help (third post)

this is the fourth post

Everyday Math Exposed: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Reverses Course (fifth post)

Carnival of Education is Now Up!

This week's Carnival of Education is now up... and I'm only halfway through it so far.

One article that really made me go "oh" was written by a veteran teacher and is entitled Who are They? He asks who are the people who grade the state writing tests? The example from his class of inadequate grading certainly floored me, and it is just another example of the poor writing evaluations that we hear about in the New SAT.

Over at The Super's Blog, I actually found a very interesting post that wasn't highlighted on the Carnival: Are Video Games Making American Smarter. I know my son would like to think so!

Take a look....

Kids are Doomed....

I'm just speechless... This is unbelievable. Someone has to demand accountablility at the schools, including ed schools. I hope this starts a blogstorm as big as Rathergate. (hat tip, Instapundit)

Critics of the assessment policy warned that aspiring teachers are being judged on how closely their political views are aligned with their instructor's. Ultimately, they said, teacher candidates could be ousted from the School of Education if they are found to have the wrong dispositions.

And the article gives ample evidence that this is actually what is happening.

More on Everyday Math and How to Get Help

Wow, I just came across a great resource for math help. It is called Kitchen Table Math and was started by two moms concerned about their childrens' math achievement because of the town's adoption of the Everyday Math curriculum. They have taken to using the Saxon Math curriculum at home -- a far greater personal commitment than what I am currently making with my daughter by using Aleks. Please check it out.

BTW, I'll be writing more about this, but my daughter made it into the "accelerated" math class for next year based on three things: her test score, her grades, and her teacher's recommendation. What a difference working with a traditional curriculum makes! Of course, her success will be attributed to the Everyday Math curriculum.  But helping my daughter is much more important than "proving" a curriculum is broken for a lot of kids.

For background, read this If Your School Has Everyday Math -- especially if you don't have the time to devote to the problem or the knowledge of math that the Kitchen Table moms do.

However, I plan to read Kitchen Table Math every day -- and also get my hands on those drill work sheets, including the fraction worksheets and the fraction square manipulatives that they talk about.

Choosing a Foreign Language for our Child

Last month I received a letter home asking me to fill out a form to "choose" my child's language for the 7th grade. The options were French, Spanish, and Latin. The form also said that my child might not get his or her first choice.

I was appalled.

Why is the school even teaching French at this point? Shouldn't schools be leaders in education? Shouldn't they help point the way towards the skills that the child will need when they finally graduate? Unless you have close relatives that are French, plan to emigrate to Quebec, or have the money to bask on the Riviera every year, there is no reason to learn French in the US. With government spending at 54% of GDP and a growth rate of 1.4% (the US rate is 3.5%, beating estimates of 3.3%) France isn't going to be creating lots of jobs in the foreseeable future -- especially for Americans. English is the universal diplomatic and business language now and not French.

For a true long-term earnings bump, Chinese is the language to learn (projected 9.1% growth in GDP). Or how about Russian? Russia (7.1% 2004 GDP growth) has a better chance for long-term development than France, and we happen to have more native Russian speakers in my town (hundreds) than French speakers (one that I know of).

Spanish, of course, has plenty of relevance in the US. And unless you want to be a scientist and take Latin, it is the only legitimate option for kids out of the three languages offered.

The Charter School in my town only offers French, with no signs of changing, so I didn't even consider them for my oldest child. Any school system that still teaches French is doing it for the short-term benefit of the currently employed teachers and the ease of administration. It is not for the long-term benefit of the children.

Most children have one shot at a language -- let's give them one that they can use.

Here is the letter that I wrote in extreme haste (slightly edited) to the school. I'll let you know whether or not my child gets Spanish next year.

To Whom It May Concern:

If my daughter does not get Spanish, please give her a study hall so she can do her homework in school and I can homeschool her in Spanish. I specifically chose this public school for my daughter because of the strong music program and the fact that it offered Spanish and the Charter school only offers French. French is not an option for my daughter for numerous reasons.

I took the French program through this town's schools. I even took a year in college. I could read Moliere in French. It does me absolutely no good in my working environment or my personal environment.

1.        I do work for a CANADIAN company, and it is more important for me to know Spanish because South America and Mexico are developing at a much faster clip than their own province of Quebec. I deal with people from Mexico and it would enhance my position if I knew the language.

2.        I have many young adults in my church whose parents only speak Spanish. I feel like an idiot not knowing the language so I can communicate with them about their children.

3.        France’s economy is on a steep decline. The international business language is English. Large French conglomerates speak English and the smaller companies won’t be hiring Americans anytime soon.

4.        The support for Spanish is overwhelming. I remember having to go into Boston to a special language store and buying outrageously priced books to supplement my French. With Spanish, you can turn the television set to multiple channels to hear native speakers, go to Target to buy Spanish rock CDs, or talk to friends at church. There are few, if any, French resources available in the home that could counter the sheer multitude of resources.

I feel that kids in the US have one shot at learning a language. I want my daughter to learn Spanish and not waste time on French. And the argument that any language is better than no language doesn’t fly with me. I gave the High School graduation speech on the advantages of a liberal arts education. Spending hours and hours on a language that you will never use at the expense of learning a language that you probably will use and will most likely enhance your earning power and social experiences is a travesty. I also have done occupational analysis. Spanish is useful. French is not.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter. 

Update: Love the comments on this post! Please read them for some wide-ranging views, including some insults, but I guess that comes with the territory. There are a couple of points that people seem to be missing; outside support for learning Spanish is overwhelming, including compute games, TV shows, music. Furthermore, if you are going to learn a language that doesn't have much outside support such as French, why not learn Russian or Chinese and get two for one; the advantage of learning another language and potential resume building over the long term?

Another Update: According to Mark Steyn, we should be learning Hindi. Read his column on China for more.

The "New" SAT

My kids aren't there yet, but I agree with these comments about the new SAT: You cannot score the writing component fairly.

Furthermore, I'm sure the observations in this passage will turn out to be true:

First, if a disappointed student has a plaintiffs' lawyer for the parent, the College Board has serious problems.  Not only are there breach of contract issues and Section 1983 claims arising from the close connection between state governments and the College Board (the "new SAT" is believed by many to be the result of political pressure from the University of California's push to find ways to get around the state's ban on the use of race and gender in admissions), but the idea of a "guinea pig" cohort of students is very off-putting.

Second, look for the testing equivalent of a "flight to quality" --increased enrollment for the ACT, which hasn't overhauled its test and which will provide a useful comparison for students, beleaguered admissions officers, and of course, tort lawyers looking at the College Board's deep pockets.

In my town, kids have always taken the SAT. With the new testing, I'm sure many more will be switching to the ACT.

I feel for those kids and parents who are going through this now. Does anyone else have any first-hand observations or insights?