FUZZY MATH STRIKES OUT

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H/T to The Blogfather.

It seems that slowly but surely school districts are bailing on the Everyday Math curriculum. Having experienced it first-hand, I could say 12 chimpanzees in a locked room could have devised this curriculum, but that’s an insult to the chimps.

Michelle Malkin reveals the pathetic educational claptrap that Everyday Math is.

Do you know what math curriculum your child is being taught? Are you worried that your third-grader hasn’t learned simple multiplication yet? Have you been befuddled by educational jargon such as “spiraling,” which is used to explain why your kid keeps bringing home the same insipid busywork of cutting, gluing and drawing? And are you alarmed by teachers who emphasize “self-confidence” over proficiency while their students fall further and further behind? Join the club.

Across the country, from New York City to Seattle, parents are wising up to math fads like “Everyday Math.” Sounds harmless enough, right? It’s cleverly marketed as a “University of Chicago” program. Impressive! Right? But then you start to sense something’s not adding up when your kid starts second grade and comes home with the same kindergarten-level addition and subtraction problems — for the second year in a row.

And then your child keeps telling you that the teacher isn’t really teaching anything, just handing out useless worksheets — some of which make no sense to parents with business degrees, medical degrees and Ph.D.s specializing in econometric analysis. And then you notice that it’s the University of Chicago education department, not the mathematics department, that is behind this nonsense.

And then you Google “Everyday Math” and discover that countless moms and dads just like you — and a few brave teachers with their heads screwed on straight — have had similarly horrifying experiences. Like the Illinois mom who found these “math” problems in the fifth-grade “Everyday Math” textbook:

A. If math were a color, it would be –, because –.
B. If it were a food, it would be –, because –.
C. If it were weather, it would be –, because –.

And then you realize your child has become a victim of “Fuzzy Math,” the “New New Math,” the dumbed-down, politically correct, euphemism-filled edu-folly corrupting both public and private schools nationwide.

Pathetic may be too weak a word to describe Everyday Math. It’s dumbed-down, politically correct pabulum as its peak. It’s part and parcel of the curriculum where kids make poster collages and dioramas but really never learn much about anything. At least that can be measured by an objective standard. Sure, a kid can make a scintillating diorama of the Civil War period, but can he or she tell us why the Civil War was fought, what its causes were? Or how and why the Battle of Gettysburg could be called the turning point of the war? Can they even tell us in what century the Civil War was fought? Not hardly.

Same with Everyday Math. Texas has dropped the very curriculum that New York City Mayor Bloomingidiot forced on the upholstered latrine known as NYC public schools. One member of the Texas state Board of Education called it the worst she’s ever seen.

I’ve seen it myself. And agree. it teaches the kids nothing. It gives them a bunch of repetitive busywork that leads absolutely nowhere and to quote a commenter from Sykes Writes:

My fourth grade daughter had a math assignment last night that was all estimations. When I told her to write the correct answer she told me she wasn’t allowed to because she would be marked wrong.That’s crazy.

Granted, there is some benefit to being able to estimate — or guesstimate if you will. It’s nice to be able to go to the grocery store and add up the items in your head to see if you have enough cash on you to pay for them or if you need to hit the ATM or use the check card. But that’s not a be all and end all in and of itself. Nor should it be.

The ability to round and estimate can only come after you know your basic math facts. And yes, that involves memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Stop that eye-rolling, you educational elitists. It didn’t hurt us, and it won’t hurt them, either.

What the proponents of Everyday Math and its other assorted clones aimed to do was remove the concept of right and wrong from math, the last bastion of the academic curriculum which hadn’t been broached by the culture of self-esteem, everybody’s right, smiley faces and gold stars on sloppy, inferior work and political correctness. In math, there was still black and white. Right and wrong.

Once you removed that element and turned it into a gray area, you got nonsense like telling kids their answers were correct if it appeared they understood the process but were unable to actually arrive at the correct answer. It’s like the old saw about letting a kid think that 4 + 3 = 8 because telling him that 4 + 3 = 7 might make him feel bad about himself.

Like I said, everyone gets a smiley face and a gold star and the actual performance gets worse and worse. It’s how the United States can be at or near the bottom of the industrialized world in virtually all academic subjects but No. 1 in self-esteem. We really suck, but we feel really good about ourselves. Talk about clueless.

The Emperor has no clothes.

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Filed under Curriculum, Math, Schools