Elementary Math:  More of the same won’t change anything

GUEST BLOG BY MARJORIE GANN, RETIRED TEACHER AND AUTHOR

As an after-school tutor who has helped a lot of elementary students with math homework since retiring from the classroom, I’ve dealt with the casualties of a math curriculum that has failed our students for decades. So when I heard about the Ontario Ministry of Education's proposal to spend $60 million to increase the time spent on math instruction in elementary classrooms, my reaction was, “More of the same won’t solve a thing!”

Parents come to tutors because they can’t figure out how to help their children with their math homework, and no wonder:  Children often arrive home without a textbook. Instead, they bring a folder filled with a jumble of photocopied worksheets collected by the teacher from various commercial workbooks. Nothing on the page indicates the goal of the lesson, and no model exercises demonstrate the steps to follow to get an answer.

When students do come home with textbooks, these are almost as confusing. Some texts offer two, or even three, different ways to do two-digit multiplication (from right to left or even – believe it or not! – from left to right). Word problems are often multi-step, but the page layout doesn’t break them down into the necessary steps. I once helped a Grade Five student with a problem on population density. I spent the better part of an hour explaining rounding, ratio, and equivalent fractions – all in one go! It was a waste of the child’s time and mine – but it was homework!

Math used to be the one subject in which immigrant children could excel. Traditional textbooks were clear and sequential, and you didn’t have to read much text to navigate the contents. Today’s textbooks are so text-heavy that neither the child nor the parent can figure out what the exercise requires. And pity the child who can’t read well!

I volunteer with a Grade Three boy – the child of a single mum from Eritrea. He is of normal intelligence and has been in Canada since kindergarten, yet he came to me unable to count by twos, to tell me if a number was odd or even, or to subtract 8 – 5 = 3. A philosophy of math education that doesn’t teach these basic skills to every child should take no pride in its emphasis on what it pretends are higher-level skills.

Middle class parents flock to tutoring services to compensate for what the Ministry of Education fails to teach their children. Most immigrant parents can’t pay for tutors. The math bureaucrats need to stop mouthing platitudes about problem-solving, and solve the problem they themselves have created – confusing children about math. They could start by looking at some of the excellent math textbooks published in the 1960s, like Addison-Wesley’s MathQuest. They were clear and sequential, easy to teach from, and filled with lots of practice exercises. And yes, they did have good word problems, too.

Marjorie Gann is a retired elementary teacher, volunteer tutor, and writer of young adult non-fiction. Her most recent book, co-authored with Janet Willen, is Speak a Word for Freedom: Women against Slavery (Tundra).

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