New math doesn’t add up for some Calgary parents
Parents of one Calgary school say the teaching of math is not only ineffective, but they’re being asked to pay extra for a consultant to sort out the confusing provincewide curriculum.
“My son has been so frustrated with math and the way he’s been trying to learn it,” said Shawna Torres, a parent with two boys at Royal Oak School.
“We just haven’t seen a lot of growth in terms of his skills.”
Kelly Penn, whose daughter attended Royal Oak and is now in Grade 5, is still struggling in math and continues to under- perform for her grade level.
“For so long, she would come home in tears and she’d say, ‘ I just don’t get it.’
“And even the teachers have told me they’re frustrated with the curriculum and they don’t like teaching it but they feel their hands are tied.”
Torres, Penn and several other parents are concerned with what has been called discovery- based learning of math where students are asked to come up with several different solutions to basic math problems.
For instance, instead of just memorizing the answer to 8 times 7, students are asked to explain different ways at reaching that solution, Torres said.
Critics of the system call the approach cumbersome, and confusing to young children. It slows down their learning and prevents them from moving on to more complex problem solving later on.
Frank Bruseker, president of the Alberta Teachers Association, said teachers have complained about inquiry- based math because it slows down the learning process.
“It just simply takes more time. You go through this method that asks kids to discover, they take longer, yet you’re expected to get through the same amount of curriculum as before,” he said.
“It’s an independent type of learning that requires a level of maturity that maybe the kids don’t have yet.”
Galileo Educational Network is a non- profit consultant’s group that conducts research and supports schools in learning.
Chief operating officer Brenda Gladstone says they offer a variety of services, and are paid in a number of different ways, sometimes by parent fundraisers, but other times by the public school board or the provincial government.
“Most of our contracts are with the provincial government.”
Gladstone says Galileo supports a wide range of learning styles, adding, “It’s no longer sufficient to just pass information from teacher to student.”
She explained students can learn through memorization, but it’s not enough. They need to learn through inquiry and discovery and learn a number of different ways to approach problems, particularly when there are no formulas.
Galileo has been at Royal Oak for a year, but Torres is outraged the school system is pushing parents to raise $ 20,000 to continue its services.
The school has scheduled a meeting and a parent vote on the fundraiser for Monday.
“Parents are already alarmed by the decline in our children’s math skills, but now we’re being asked to fundraise to keep this curriculum in our kids’ schools,” Torres said.
“We don’t want that. We want more balance.”
The parents’ views are being supported in a new study published last week by the C. D. Howe Institute, which says Canadian students’ math skills have been on a decade- long decline after rote learning was replaced by discoverybased methods.
“You know what’s the worst kind of instruction? The kind of instruction that makes kids feel stupid. And that’s what a lot of that discovery stuff does; their working memory gets overloaded, they’re confused,” said the report’s author, Anna Stokke, an associate professor in the University of Winnipeg’s department of mathematics and statistics.
“I think these parents need to fight this, and make sure these consultants don’t stay in their kids’ schools. There is no evidence to support this kind of learning.”
Stokke says she has already seen a number of deficits in the math skills of her own university- aged students centred around basic learning, including the use of fractions.
Since the introduction of discoverybased math about a decade ago, Stokke says students are being overwhelmed with trying to figure out basic skills, like multiplication, which should simply be memorized.
And when they go on to more complex problem- solving, she says, they struggle, they feel defeated and then quickly give up.
Stokke recommends schools go back to more traditional teaching, but still teach some discoverybased learning as well, at an 80/ 20 ratio.
CBE spokeswoman Megan Geyer explained that math curriculum is set by Alberta Education and that teachers have the flexibility to teach it in a variety of ways to ensure students are successful.
“In addition to memorizing basic facts, and building a base of mathematical skills, we also teach students to use reasoning skills and to solve problems in different ways.”
Geyer added that in terms of the fundraiser for Galileo, while the province funds all educational resources, schools can choose to fundraise to “enhance” those resources.