That IS the question. The answer… I’ll take mastery for $100.
In the war over school math — in which a judge recently ordered Seattle Public Schools to redo its choice of high-school math — Schmitz Park is a redoubt or, it hopes, a beachhead. North Beach is a redoubt for Saxon Math, a traditional program. Both schools have permission to be different. The rest of the district’s elementary schools use Everyday Math, a curriculum influenced by the constructivist or reform methods.
Reform math is known for several things. Instead of showing kids how to solve a problem, which Singapore Math does, reform math has them work in groups to discover ways to solve it. It wants them to explain how they did it, sometimes using a special vocabulary.
Sabrina Kovacs-Storlie, a supplemental math teacher at Schmitz Park, taught reform math for several years. “It is full of words,” she says. “So many words.”
That it is. What does it accomplish? Kids who are looking for math as an escape from “words”, english and essays can’t escape. How frustrating.
Math is it’s own language. You can tell if someone understands math by how they do a problem. If you can’t you need to examine the problem(s).
