The "Train Wreck" called Everyday Mathematics

Our school system was using Everyday Mathematics (often referred to as "fuzzy math" by critics) at the time my oldest child was ready to start school. My next-door neighbor used to complain about it when her sons were in elementary school. I have also seen copies at the local used book store. I have been reading about EM for a few years now, and you never see glowing reviews of EM except on the web sites of vendors, or the web sites of teachers who are "in the tank" for "reformed" curricula.

This is an account of Barry Garelick's experience with his daughter's trials with EM. Essentially, in order for her to learn math he had to tutor her, as a lot of parents are doing these days. Mr. Garelick is an analyst with the U.S. EPA and lives in the Washington DC area, and he majored in mathematics at the University of Michigan. He is also a columnist for EducationNews.org.

By fourth grade, I was seeing some of the confusion caused by EM’s alternative algorithms. This aspect of EM has been written about extensively so I won’t dwell on it here except to say I wanted to make sure my daughter understood the standard algorithms for two-digit multiplication and for long division. Her teacher insisted they use the alternative algorithms offered by EM; she did not teach the standard algorithm for long division. Some of the teachers at her school offered tutoring services, so we hired one of them to teach her the standard algorithms.

The teacher/tutor did as we instructed and after four sessions, my daughter was excited to show me how she could do long division. She wrote out a long division problem but got stuck along the way when she didn't know the answer to 28 divided by 7. Long division is predicated on students knowing their multiplication facts.

My daughter was not alone in this; many of the students in her class did not know them. Perhaps her tutor had discussed what to do in such instances. It was apparent that whatever she told her was not to brush up on her facts, but rather go back to first principles, since my daughter was now drawing 28 little lines on the sheet of
paper and grouping them by 7’s.

Read the rest here.

I know EM has - or used to have - a web site offering support for parents and children. However, apparently not everyone knows about it or it is no longer in existence. It seems I read some time ago that California schools are dropping the program. I wonder if our school system still uses the program and, if so, why?