Where’s the Math? No, seriously….where’s the math?

Tuesday I was at a curriculum mapping workshop to further develop the work that I talked about yesterday. This workshop was my first real chance to sit down with the new “Adopted Washington State K-8 Mathematics Standards” document that OSPI recently put out. Depending on your point of view it’s either great:

These standards focus on building the capacity of students to think mathematically. They do so while thoughtfully addressing concerns that some recent math curricula pay inadequate attention to developing computational competence.

or, synthesizing some of the more negative comments I’ve seen, it’s a step backwards from what was already a terrible system for developing math standards, spawned from the depths of hell itself by Beelzebub Bergeson.

Frankly, I’m totally Swiss neutral on the whole thing. I think that our failure rate on the WASL math test should give everyone statewide pause, because it’s a very passable test that I think a high school student should be able to do.

Anyhow, the new standards document is a sea change from the GLEs and the EALRs before them. The criticism of the GLEs was always that they were “a mile wide and an inch deep”; exposure was given more credence than mastery, which is the opposite of how it should be. The new standards (let’s call them the Danas, for fun!) are certainly more targeted, an approach which echoes what the NCTM suggested in their recent Curriculum Focal Points document, but that means some things had to go.

Here’s the real-life example, then. In first grade it used to be that two of our major units during the year were teaching time (to the hour and half-hour) and money (up to a dollar); those have both been removed from the 1st grade standards. We also used to at least touch on fractions and probability, but those are gone too. In their place there’s a much greater emphasis on number sense.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’ve had a lot of success in years past teaching time and money to the first graders; developmentally, they’re ready and they get it. Frankly those are two of the fun units because of all the manipulatives that you can use to teach either. The second grade teachers are apoplectic, because their job looks like it just got a lot harder.

On the other hand, I’m willing to give it a try. I feel like we need to commit to this for it to be successful, and that’s the pitfall that I’m seeing down the road—if schools and teachers don’t commit to this sequence fully, then in three years there will be more hue and cry over why our kids aren’t learning.

A corollary to this is the question of what assigning a standard to a particular grade means; does that indicate that specific grade level is responsible for the topic, or that mastery is expected by then? The two are drastically different approaches that both have credence--which way do we go?

The only constant is change; it’s just odd that some of the most frequent change has been to our standards documents. Shouldn’t some learnings be timeless?