sentosa said:
I grew up with the old way. To the contrary of many people's understanding, we have used many memorization and drills. But we also have a lot of practice for challenging problems which intensively involve problem solving & logic thinking.
The approach here is to ditch most of the memorization & drills, and magically move to some amazing problem solving skills.
Sorry, it just doesn't work that way. There is no shortcut if you want to really master math.
If they really want to do the Asian way, they should learn the total approach, and be able to understand why it works.
Unfortunately I don't think any of them do.
Actually... they don't remove most memorization... just not as many drills.
My kids still do math facts and are told to practice them daily because in the end, despite the Internet, you should still be able to answer 7x8. They still have math fact quizzes in school but their unit tests are more word problems and require logic and learned solution techniques.
Do you even know what "the approach" is other than all the negatives you find on the Internet? What do your kids tell you? What do your kids teachers tell you? What does their homework, quizzes and tests look like?
I find that many parents are complaining about Common Core but haven't taken the time to actually determine what is being taught. And from what I understand, for Integrated Math, it's still Alg/Geo/Trig, but they are just being taught together rather than separately by year.
And BTW, the idea isn't to master math... the idea is to be able to learn ways to understand math more easily and apply those techniques to other areas of learning.
And if I recall correctly, in the Common Core thread you were complaining about how American education is behind when it comes to math and that math is taught better in other countries... but that's why Common Core exists... to update our "behind the times math education" and to incorporate "other countries'" methods of math education.
Disclaimer: Montessori math education seems to be aligned with how Common Core works which is why I'm a proponent of it. All the kids I know who transitioned from Montessori to public school found IUSD math quite easy ("boring" was the word used) and recognize that the Common Core way is actually more like how they learned math.