Math in Focus, which essentially is identical to the text used by about 80 percent of elementary students in Singapore, a tiny Asian city-state whose kids have been hitting the ball out of the park on international math assessments since the late 1990s. Fayette County is hoping for similar results.
So-called "Singapore math" features problems that often are more complex than American textbooks contain. It demands deep mastery of a few math concepts, rather than an overview of many different ideas. And it aims to give students a basic understanding of how math works, rather than a simple rote system for finding answers.
Because the nine Fayette schools' experiment with Singapore math began only last fall, direct pre- and post-Singapore standardized test results are not yet available. But anecdotally, teachers say early results look promising. "I know I'm teaching math at a much higher level now than I ever taught it before, and the students are grasping it more quickly," Cox said....
Monday, January 25, 2010
Singapore math a success so far in Fayette Co.
This from Jim Warren at the Herald-Leader:
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2 comments:
We used Singapore Math in our three years of homeschooling-- and were quite pleased. I would add that it features a heavier dose of "mental math".
One funny/sad little anecdote: when we were choosing a school in our return to institutional schooling, one teacher/principal combo noted our one child's ability to do mental math but was more concerned that he didn't yet know the definition of an obtuse angle.
Stuff like that makes me crazy.
I would occasionally run into a teacher who would identify one particular curriculum element they believed was indicative of much more than it was, and use that deficit as a reason to retain a child.
A whole year - because a child lacked something that could be taught within one week, or worse, something fairly unimportant to begin with.
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