Math Homework

You know, I like math. I was always good at it, well except for the fiasco of 8th grade algebra, which I failed because I didn't want to be there, because it was an accelerated class, and I don't know, I was rebelling against something. I took algebra again in 9th grade, when you were "supposed" to take it, and got an A+ and a 98 on the Regents. With the same teacher. It hadn't been him, it wasn't the material, it was me acting out stupidly. I digress. Except for that, I was good at arithmetic and algebra and geometry and trigonometry. I even tutored it in high school.

The 2nd grader's math homework is killing me.



A couple of months ago, there was the idiotic homework assignment of "using blue and yellow strips (and other nonstandard tools which can measure length, like pencils and linking cubes) to find approximate measures of length of objects in school and at home. The blue strips are twice as long as the yellow strips, so this gives students a natural opportunity to consider halves of units and to explore the relationships among the measurements with blues and yellows."

Sounds reasonable, right? Well, the homework assignment was to find a bunch of things in the house which measured exactly, say, 5 blue strips. As it happened, a blue strip was actually six inches long, so finding something that measured 5 blue strips meant finding something in the house that was 30" long (or wide or high). Do you know how hard that is? It's one thing to measure objects and record their lengths, but to locate something that's a predetermined length means that Mom is running around the house with a tape measure in advance of the girl so that Mom can suggest things to measure, because if Mom doesn't pre-select things for the girl, homework is going to take eleventeen hours. Royal pain in the maternal ass. Furthermore, it's a dumb exercise - it's not teaching anything at all. If you were to measure something with blue strips and then with yellow strips and compare your results, you might learn something about 2 times x = 2x.

I grumbled and tweeted and drank my wine, and then I put my homework antipathy aside. Until the other night, when a fresh new hell came home from school: Beat the Calculator.

The instructions that were sent home called for two players, one to add four single digits with a calculator, and one to add the same digits in their head. But the whole thing dissolved into tears and recriminations because 1) the game was played differently at school ("One player is the Caller, a second player is the Calculator, and the third is the Brain") and 2) there was no way that the child was ever going to win. Calculator or brain, I'm always going to be faster (well, maybe not a few years from now, but we're talking now now). So the kid ended up in tears because we weren't playing by the rules she'd learned in school and because I kept beating her. What kind of learning experience is that? Bad, bad, bad.

Frankly, I couldn't figure out the point of the exercise anyway, so I poked around on the web until I found a (cached) page from the Terc Investigations site explaining the use of calculators, including this paragraph:

In Grade 2 there is an activity called Beat the Calculator (see Coins, Coupons, and Combinations, page 39) which is a built-into-the-curriculum kind of example. Students have been working on solving number strings -- adding together several single digit numbers such as 7 + 4 + 3 + 4 + 5. Many students do this by adding together the numbers that equal ten (7+3), and/or doubles facts that they just know (4+4), and then adding those sums together along with any other leftover numbers (5). After they have worked on this a while, Beat the Calculator is introduced. One partner adds a number string mentally while the other tries to add the numbers in order on the calculator. What comes out of this, in the classroom, is that the child working mentally is almost always faster than the child with the calculator.

So the point is? Brains are better than calculators? Well, really they aren't. You can do a damned sight more calculating on a calculator. But you need to know the basics, and to know that for small stuff you don't need a calculator. But that's not what this dumb exercise was teaching. Oy.

Yes, I sent in a note to the teacher: "This caused unnecessary tears and no learning was accomplished, nor reinforced". To her credit, she called to apologize and told us to put aside tear-inducing homework in the future. But still. Oy.