Math at the Neighborhood Charter School

So far we’ve done none of the things I thought we would but it’s been a great summer anyway.  The kids went to camp in Tennessee with their grandparents and we all went camping up there afterwards.  It’s nice to camp in the mountains and wake up COLD in the middle of summer.

This video has had us entertained this week.  It is truly awesome and awe-inspiring.  Enjoy.

Our post-school math activities have dropped precipitously over the past couple of weeks.  We are all ready for summer.  After a brief period of laziness we will start a light summer curriculum that will some Singapore materials, science experiments, music lessons and some practical applications including figuring out MARTA including buses.

I figured this would be a great summer to try to get around on MARTA as much as possible with gas prices sky high.  So we’ll be figuring out routes and times and time blocking/management.  I want to leave as much of this process up to the kids as possible so they can get a feeling for planning ahead, anticipating needs and adjusting to unexpected changes.  We’ll be blogging about our adventures here over the summer.

We’re also looking forward to a good bit of Guitar Hero III and some pickup baseball games on the fields in Grant Park.  Email me if you want to join in the pickup games and didn’t participate in Grant Park Baseball this spring.  Also on the agenda are a few summer camps, a week with grandparents and a week at the beach (Jekyll Island).

Have a great summer, hope to see you out and about!

I noticed the other day when my son was doing computer research for a project at school that he was slowed down considerably by his hunt n peck method of typing.  After a little research I found a delightful typing program for kids.  The British program from BBC schools is called Dance Mat Typing.  It’s a cute program with 4 levels with pretty extensive practice at each level.

It’s fun and funny enough that he actually BEGS me to work on his typing.  You start at “home row” and move on to different letter combinations practicing keystrokes like “ask dad” (left hand, home row) until it is intuitive. The program mimics how I remember learning to type but way more fun.

Surely this will ease work on the computer for him when he’s a fluent typer.

Here’s an article that is quite the eye-opener.  Sam Dillon explores Korean schools’ massive surge to gain entry into American Ivy League schools.  Obviously the rigorousness of the school he visits is not desirable nor probably achievable by US standards.  However it is something to think about - our kids will be competing with these kids - forget about Ivy League schools - in life, given the rate of increased globalisation.

Here is a sample schedule:

Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s on the SAT verbal and math tests, and 790 in writing…

So she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school bus at 6:50. Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help classmates clean her classroom. Between 8 and noon, she hears Korean instructors teach supply and demand in economics, Korean soils in geography and classical poets in Korean literature.

At lunch she joins other raucous students, all, like her, wearing blue blazers, in a chow line serving beans and rice, fried dumpling and pickled turnip, which she eats with girlfriends. Boys, who sit elsewhere, wolf their food and race to a dirt lot for a 10-minute pickup soccer game before afternoon classes.

Kim Hyun-kyung joins other girls at a hallway sink to brush her teeth before reporting to French literature, French culture and English grammar classes, taught by Korean instructors. At 3:20, her English language classes begin. This day, they include English literature…

Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus…

“I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she said.

How do you envision your child’s future education?  Does your child have a vision for his own future yet?  Does it include rigorous academics like this?  I think about half that schedule would still be very intense for Americans yet still leave room for a bit of normalcy.  Another consideration is that this is representative of a Korean fast track school.  I wonder what happens to the kids in “regular” programs.  In the end, how do both groups achieve relative success and happiness?  How do we prepare our kids for success and happiness without going overboard either way?

Over the summer I will continue to post to this blog - some maintenance activities to keep us sharp but also more articles and questions like these.  I look forward to your comments and insight.

in the New York Times with possibly the worst headline ever:

Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and Slices

It always amazes me when these studies are published how easily both the authors and the conductors of the studies often overlook the most interesting part of the study.  In this study to be published in today’s journal of Science, the experiment tests college students who are taught a new math concept either using abstract symbols or through concrete examples.  In yet another attempt to skewer modern math the author is quick to point out that this randomized controlled study proved that the students who learned using abstract symbols performed significantly better than students who learned through concrete examples.  What the author of both this article and the study GLOSS over completely is that students who first learned through concrete examples and were later taught the abstract symbols outperformed both of the other groups!!!!

What this says to me is that we’re not on the wrong path by teaching our kids using hands on approaches and concrete examples.  However it is a warning that ultimately we need to follow up with the abstract symbols.  I still maintain from my own experiences both teaching and learning math that regular practice helps immensely.

In a recent ( March 3rd, 2008 ) New Yorker Annals of Science article, Jim Holt explores the question, “Are our brains wired for math?” The article covers principles of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neurology and how they illuminate the way humans relate to numbers. He begins by discussing some research on patients with brain injuries - how their brains compensate (or not) and process numbers and math with significant injury. This research tells us a lot about how the normal brain processes numbers and math. There is also a lot of talk about the research of scanning normal brains while the subject is performing math. He eventually discusses math in early education as well and leads into some interesting concepts. He spends most of the article profiling the research of Stanislas Dehaene. For instance:

If you are asked to choose which of a pair of Arabic numerals—4 and 7, say—stands for the bigger number, you respond “seven” in a split second, and one might think that any two digits could be compared in the same very brief period of time. Yet in Dehaene’s experiments, while subjects answered quickly and accurately when the digits were far apart, like 2 and 9, they slowed down when the digits were closer together, like 5 and 6. Performance also got worse as the digits grew larger: 2 and 3 were much easier to compare than 7 and 8. When Dehaene tested some of the best mathematics students at the École Normale, the students were amazed to find themselves slowing down and making errors when asked whether 8 or 9 was the larger number.

Which leads him to this fascinating conclusion:

Dehaene conjectured that, when we see numerals or hear number words, our brains automatically map them onto a number line that grows increasingly fuzzy above 3 or 4. He found that no amount of training can change this. “It is a basic structural property of how our brains represent number, not just a lack of facility,” he told me.

When he gets to the part about math and education

The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent.

At this point he arrives at two seemingly contradictory conclusions.

First:

Our inbuilt ineptness when it comes to more complex mathematical processes has led Dehaene to question why we insist on drilling procedures like long division into our children at all. There is, after all, an alternative: the electronic calculator. “Give a calculator to a five-year-old, and you will teach him how to make friends with numbers instead of despising them,” he has written. By removing the need to spend hundreds of hours memorizing boring procedures, he says, calculators can free children to concentrate on the meaning of these procedures, which is neglected under the educational status quo.

and then, sort of astonishingly:

This attitude might make Dehaene sound like a natural ally of educators who advocate reform math, and a natural foe of parents who want their children’s math teachers to go “back to basics.” But when I asked him about reform math he wasn’t especially sympathetic. “The idea that all children are different, and that they need to discover things their own way—I don’t buy it at all,” he said. “I believe there is one brain organization. We see it in babies, we see it in adults. Basically, with a few variations, we’re all traveling on the same road.”

I’ve pulled some of the relevant to us parts out but I believe it is important to see these excerpts in the context of the whole article which you can find in its entirety here. I hope many of you will take some time to read this article and comment on your thoughts as it relates to what we are doing and experiencing with our children.

If you are interested in seeing the CRCT for yourself or helping your child familiarize themselves with the format or content, visit the Georgia Department of Education CRCT Study Guides for grades 1-5.

As soon as I can find dates for the CRCT I will post them here.

I know we don’t like to think of putting our kids noses to the grindstone but I find this the hardest time of year to stay focused.  We’ve got spring flings and fundraisers and baseball and testing and spring break and more testing and all the delightful trappings of spring.  So in order to make the most of what’s left in the year we do have to think grindstone just a little bit.  With that in mind I’ll share with you one single but comprehensive learning website called Brainpop!  This site covers Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts/Music, Health and Technology including movies, explanations and exercises.  Have Fun!

As promised a fun-only delightful video of a real live pet hippo in South Africa! If you are feeling exceptionally motivated you can make your kids find South Africa on a map. There are other highly entertaining, marginally educational links below too!

Jessica the Hippopotamus likes weak sweet coffee, massages, and sleeping with the dogs!

Skidboot the amazing dog I don’t know who’s more amazing, the dog or his human.

Water balloon exploding at high speed vs Water balloon NOT exploding at high speed.

Today’s post is just a few links to some low-key, no-pressure, online math games that might be fun if you are so inclined towards extra practice before next week’s Iowa tests.   Next week’s post will be purely fun links  for after-school, post-test relaxation.  A hippopotamus is coming your way!
Math is Fun:  Puzzles and games

Math Fun Manipulatives 

Cool Math Games

Fun Brain - has math games and other education materials including online books!

Math Cats - interactive thinking games