Have you ever wondered if there is a better way to understand and remember mathematical order of operations than PEMDAS, BIDMAS, GEMA, or any of the other happy mnemonics that only go so far? It’s been a bugaboo for so many teachers over time. During a recent work trip to St. Croix, USVI, I realized I hadn’t written my thoughts about it in my book. So I wrote a chapter all about it. If you’d like to read the chapter, wonderful! Just sign up to my email list, and you’ll get a link to download it for free. Don’t forget…
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Many people aren’t aware that there are two different types of division. Even if you search the web, only one type mostly comes up. It’s the type we learn first: that when we share one quantity, we split it into equal parts. This is partitive division, or dividing a quantity into parts. When we divide a whole amount, partitive division tells us how many items there are in each group. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Jeanine bought 24 buns for a party. She wanted to put an equal amount on each of 6 tables.How many buns should she…
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A Delaware school district has successfully implemented Singapore Math, raising enjoyment, understanding, and test scores. This article describes their success. Here is one example: Mount Pleasant Elementary Principal Joyce Skrobot did not need to be convinced to add Singapore math to the curriculum. Her school piloted the program over the past four years in some second-grade classes, and, on state tests, they outperformed the classes that did not use the math, she said. “It really establishes a strong foundation of math skills with a lot of repetition,” she said. “It’s a very concrete approach to teaching.” The district plans to…
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About two weeks ago, a post titled “Singapore Math Is ‘Our Dirty Little Secret’” appeared on the Core Knowledge blog. It criticized the New York Times article about Singapore Math that appeared on October 1. Apparently, the author believes that the poor state of math education in the US is due to what he calls “reform math.” This ignores an entire generation of math-phobic adults who learned math through “traditional” methods, and most likely instigated the reform movement due to their dissatisfaction with those methods. While the curricula based purely on constructivist approaches have their limitations, the idea that Singapore…
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Bill Jackson, the Scarsdale Singapore Math coach who is making waves nationwide, wrote an interesting series for The Daily Riff. The first article lays out how he got interested in Singapore Math. Here is a quote from his experience working with Japanese math teachers: When I began working with the Japanese teachers, I soon realized three important reasons why they were such good math teachers: (1) They had a high level of math content knowledge. In fact, I felt that their first grade teachers knew more about math than I did as an 8th grade teacher! (2) They used thin,…
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Following on from last Friday’s New York Times article, the NY Times blogs ran a brief follow-up article titled, “A Slower Approach to Math,” with the opportunity to add your own comments to it. There were some pretty interesting thoughts there, which inspired me to add the following comment: As a teacher experienced in teaching Singapore Math and training other teachers to use it, I am constantly learning about the state of education around our country, especially in math. I see Singapore Math has many strengths as a curriculum and approach, and more of these are being adopted into our…
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Are you looking for ideas about how to engage students in math, or show them how it applies to the real world? Here is a fun one for sports lovers. John Roach at msnbc.com recently published an article called “The Math and Science of Baseball.” It outlines various ways in which math and science have been applied to the sport. We all know about batting averages, but did you know scientists have analyzed everything from how likely it is that the best team will win with the current number of games vs. the ideal number of games per season, that…
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Last Friday, this New York times article about Singapore Math appeared. The premise of the beginning of the article is that by studying one number at a time slowly, students learn more thoroughly and therefore build a better mathematical foundation. This is true, even if it is an oversimplification of the curriculum. Here is a quote from the article: Principals and teachers say that slowing down the learning process gives students a solid math foundation upon which to build increasingly complex skills, and makes it less likely that they will forget and have to be retaught the same thing in…
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This homeschooling website has an article about Singapore Math that is short but informative. It tells a brief history of Singapore Math in the US, then goes into why it may or may not be the best choice for a homeschooling curriculum. Here is an extract from the article: The curriculum uses a true spiral approach, a method that is used less successfully in the United States. In the spiral approach, the curriculum assumes prior mastery of the subject in the previous grade and so does not review basic processes but moves on to a higher level in each subject.…
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A New York Times Magazine article titled Building a Better Teacher appeared last March. It’s an excellent contribution to the debate about what makes a good teacher. As the article describes, it’s not enough to care a lot; there are many caring teachers who can’t get their students’ attention to teach them anything. Being a good teacher is not strongly correlated with the graduate schools they attend, their teacher test scores, or particular personality characteristics. None of these predicts teacher effectiveness well. Merit pay and high pay incentives, haven’t worked to improve teacher quality (or test scores) either. In fact,…
