Math gurus: Carnegie Math?

[Chrysalis Academy]

Is anybody familiar with this program? I tried searching, but just got a bunch of posts about assigning credit (carnegie hours).

 

http://www.carnegielearning.com/

 

I was chatting with a math teacher at the local high school about how they are adapting to common core.  He said everything is pretty up in the air - given that cc is a set of standards, not a curriculum - but that the district is telling parents that the math teachers are "creating their own materials", while the math teachers are going - huh? we are?  Interesting . . . 

 

Anyway, he said they were hoping to pilot this program next year.  I was just wondering if anyone here was familiar with it.

[wapiti]

:lurk5:

[wapiti]

http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/164864/carnegie_math.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/technology/a-classroom-software-boom-but-mixed-results-despite-the-hype.html?_r=0

 

http://www.ofhsmath.com/assets/mathcourses.pdf (The Carnegie Math Series is designed for students who have struggled with mathematics in middle

school. Students will cover three years of content in a four year span.)

 

http://7thgrademathteacherextraordinaire.blogspot.com/2012/04/carnegie-learning-math.html

 

I will try to dig around more later to see what I can find.  So far, I am getting a combination fuzzy/Common Core vibe from a marketing angle, but I haven't looked at the content yet.

 

[Chrysalis Academy]

Interesting.  Thanks, wapiti.

 

My conversation with this math teacher was so interesting, and enlightening too.  He commented that while many of his students are fine with plug-n-chug type math where they just do a page of the same kind of problem that has been demonstrated, they have almost zero problem solving skills.  Most of those kids have been using Houghton-Mifflin CA math in elementary and middle school.  I asked him what he thought would help in the early grades, and he said games.  He said he wanted to write a book for parents convincing them that the best thing they could do with their young kids is to play games with them - yahtzee, parchesi, any kind of logic and problem solving skill requiring game where they have to think ahead about their choices.  He teaches his algebra students cribbage, and he says it helps their math reasoning better than anything else he's done.

 

I also asked him what he thought the biggest barrier was to his students' ability to succeed in algebra, expecting him to say fractions or ratios or something, but he said no: it's 3rd grade math.  He says most of the struggling students he sees fell off the boat in 3rd grade.  He gets 9th grade algebra students in his "slow" class (slow in pace) who struggle with multiplication.

 

So it's partly poor preparation, but then he said that half the incoming freshman class is ready for geometry in 9th grade - something like 70-80 students - but by senior year he only has ~35 students in calculus.  So they are losing more than half that started out on the accelerated track during the 4 years of high school.  More girls than boys make it to calculus, fwiw.

 

Anyway, it was really interesting to hear all this from him.  I remain convinced that homeschooling is the right thing for my kids, academically.

[kiana]

My conversation with this math teacher was so interesting, and enlightening too.  He commented that while many of his students are fine with plug-n-chug type math where they just do a page of the same kind of problem that has been demonstrated, they have almost zero problem solving skills.  

 

FWIW, I see this at the university.

 

Evaluate this? Fine. Solve this equation? Usually okay. But problem solving/sanity checks?

 

For example: If the half-life of a radioactive substance is 7 days, how much of a 10-gram sample remains after 14 days? Now, someone who has understood what half-life is should be able to immediately say "Oh, so it's 14 days -- that's 2 half-lives, so there will be 1/4 of the original amount left, because half of a half is a quarter. 1/4 of 10 grams is 2.5 grams.

 

Most of the class, when asked this question, will either go straight to the formula we learned in class (which is correct, it's just sssslllooowwww) or skip it because it's a word problem.

[MarkT]

http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/164864/carnegie_math.html

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/technology/a-classroom-software-boom-but-mixed-results-despite-the-hype.html?_r=0

 

http://www.ofhsmath.com/assets/mathcourses.pdf (The Carnegie Math Series is designed for students who have struggled with mathematics in middle

school. Students will cover three years of content in a four year span.)

 

http://7thgrademathteacherextraordinaire.blogspot.com/2012/04/carnegie-learning-math.html

 

I will try to dig around more later to see what I can find.  So far, I am getting a combination fuzzy/Common Core vibe from a marketing angle, but I haven't looked at the content yet.

 

Ah yes the "business" of education versus reality.  This forum discusses many different text books for different learning styles for which most can be purchased used at very reasonable prices.  The big Edu companies would prefer a leasing model and charge for each child each year at a higher cost. They are using Common Core as a pretext.  At the upper levels, CC math moves a few Algebra topics to the middle school level and pushes for more "modeling" which means usually means more practical application examples which the text books should have had anyways.  Is this any reason to create completely new text books?

 

A couple of group math "labs" a month would not hurt but total collaborative learning is a dead-end. They also push too much technology versus real math understanding.