Comments about the “blended” math program in Kinawa Middle School

I come before the board again because I am concerned about the current math program in the middle school. My sixth grade daughter is in the seventh grade math class. I have seen it going from very good in the beginning of the school year to pretty bad right now. Yes, there is some improvement in math classes compared to 1996 school year when CMP was first introduced in Kinawa. For example, the class is moving at a much faster pace. In principle, students and parents have access to another textbook.

The major improvement came in the beginning of the school year when the non-CMP math textbook “Algebra One Interactions” was used. Together with homework assignments of 10-15 problems a day, the class provided a no-nonsense approach in the first two months. Starting late in October, students in seventh grade switched to CMP units on the topics: “Introducing Algebra” and “Geometry: Similarity”. Now a third CMP unit, “Comparing and Scaling” is introduced.

The main goal of the “Introducing Algebra” unit is to teach the student the linear equation: y=ax. This is mainly taught near the end of the unit. To get there, the students are led through detours of 3 chapters learning about non-linear graphs such as those of hunger and happiness. (Please note that Okemos schools teach students about reading graphs starting in kindergarten.) In the case of my daughter, she was weak in understanding and writing linear equations at the beginning of this unit. At the end, she was still not proficient in it.

The second CMP unit “Stretching and Shrinking” teaches scaling factors and similarity in geometry. The main goal of this unit is to teach students to understand similarity used in geometry.  More importantly, for a curriculum that stresses real life problems, the unit advertises teaching students how to use the properties of similar triangles to determine the height of objects, for example.  Unfortunately after all the detours of drawing wumps and Rep-tiles which I’ll explain in a few minute, the students never mastered the shadow method to determine the height of an object.

Let me use some real life examples to illustrate the points I want to make. One night, my daughter spent nearly three hours drawing 4 “wumps”. I have enclosed a wump for your reference.  Instead of drawing all those wumps, most of the points in the lesson could have been taught by drawing a rectangle and it will take much less time. Another example is the rep-tile exercise. In the October parent math meeting, the parents were asked to find “a way to divide each shape (a copy is attached for your entertainment) into four congruent, smaller shapes that are similar to the original shape.” When I asked what the students were supposed to learn from this, the question de-railed the lesson. One teacher said that the objective was to teach the concept of reduction which obviously was wrong. The exercise is to create “Rep-tiles”, a term I could not find in any college or high school geometry books. I asked several Math and Physics professors, and none has heard of the term nor could they see the reason for teaching this. Can you explain to me why precious class time is spent teaching this or drawing Wumps instead of teaching students the essence of this unit, i.e. how to use the properties of similar triangles or scale factors to find distance or height?

The CMP unit currently used is “comparing and scaling” to teach proportional reasoning. The teachers said that the last two chapters will be barely touched upon. For example, the sampling methods used in polling to estimate population which we hear everyday from radios, TV, newspaper and magazine will not be taught. Instead, my daughter and I just went through a torturous explanation about the number of visitor hours spent in the Federal Recreational Park Service.

The intent of the blended program is to have the best of both worlds of traditional and CMP math. However, the execution suggests that the current curriculum chooses the worst of the CMP.  That part of the CMP curriculum of teaching the children how to solve real life problems is left on the wayside probably because the skills that the students need to do these problems are not there.

As I mentioned in December, the Texas Education Agency (a government agency) ruled that CMP meets only about 60% of Texas curriculum standards. More recently, the mathematicallycorrect, a parent advocacy group based in California, reviewed 11 seventh grade books. CMP ranked last and received an F grade. The reviewers said “Students are busy, but they are not productively busy. Most of their time is directed away from true understanding and useful skills.” and that “It is impossible to recommend a book with as little content as this and an inefficient, if philosophically attractive, instructional method.” Many Okemos parents have repeatedly made similar comments about CMP. For our children’s sake, I urge the board to listen to these voices.

1. To ensure that we have a curriculum that is not “a mile wide and an inch deep”, all the non-essential brain-teasers materials in CMP should be identified and thrown out. In their place, the material from the traditional math book be incorporated so that the central idea of the math topics is explored in depth.

2. It has been argued that CMP is more effective in teaching the understanding of math concepts. Appropriate homework problems from the traditional math books should be assigned so that parents can see the progress without being distorted by all the crafty projects of showing creativity in making posters or writing poems as in the sixth grade classes.

Finally, since more than 90% of the parents do not attend the parents math night, the district should choose a curriculum which allows parents to help their children and monitor their progress without attending these meetings.