Our local public school district has come up with some inventive, nay ridiculously complicated, ways to teach what ought to be fairly plain and simple.
Ever heard of "hairy" math?
Yeah, this was new to me, too, until someone in a neighborhood chat group mentioned it and I had to know more.
I am always interested in what my children's publicly schooled peers are doing because I don't want my kids to grow up saying things like, "Gosh, I don't know this because I had the misfortune of being homeschooled."
Turns out that instead of teaching first and second graders how to count money using the tried and true methods of handling actual money, memorizing the values of various coins based on the ways the coins look, i.e. the copper-colored Lincoln guy is always worth one cent, the students are being asked to draw lines or "hairs" out from pictures of coins to help them count by fives.
In other words, a nickel is worth one hair. A quarter would have five lines emanating from its edges.
A former teacher clued me in as to the asinine reasoning behind this practice.
If you guessed the Almighty Standardized Test At Whose Throne All Texas Students Must Bow you're right.
The ASTAWTATSMB drives the boat when it comes to public education such that not much real education takes place. Instead, it's all about test-taking strategies.
The hairy math is a visual crutch, my teacher friend tells me. It's used so that students who aren't developmentally ready to tackle abstractions like assigning values to coins can still manage to score high on the damned standardized tests.
Never mind that these kids aren't developmentally ready.
The windowpanes are a whole other joke.
These are used to help students organize information in word problems, I'm told. But instead of helping kids actually work the problems, this artsy element wastes their time. Kids who can get the right answer without plugging numbers into empty squares get points off for NOT using the windowpane. A friend of mine whose son had to use this method in elementary school said she and her husband had to attend a special parents' event just so they could be taught what to do to help their children with homework!
She left the school that night dazed and confused, wondering why they didn't just teach kids to look for key phrases that would tell them whether a word problem was calling for addition or subtraction.
I wonder the same thing.
Homeschoolers are often warned to watch out for gimmicky programs that promise to teach our kids geometry in 10 minutes a day or conversational German in just 48 hours.
Looks like parents of kids in public school might benefit from a similar warning.
Gimmicks, smoke and mirrors. No wonder American students STILL lag behind other countries in math and science.
When you're spending all your time splitting hairs and drawing windows, you don't have much left over in which to do actual work.
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