Re: Excerpts from alleged 5th grade math anti-textbook

["dancinglight" <dancinglight@sbcglobal.net>]

Yes, and yes.

They know how to compute an average.  Or, I should say, they know how to
find the mean, median, and mode.  I taught them.  They should learn it in
school.  I didn't teach them out of a text book.

The difference, I guess, is this;

For me, the textbook is not the curriculum.  It is one tool for delivering
that curriculum.  It isn't the curriculum itself, nor is walking kids
through a text book necessarily "teaching."  I've yet to see any textbook,
traditional or non-standard, that was totally complete.  I've never
considered any text I taught out of a bible for teaching math, and I've
never assumed that I was supposed to follow what the book said like a
script.  I've always assumed it was a guideline, but nothing more.

For others, I guess, the textbook is the "curriculum."  I guess it would
never occur to some to do anything that wasn't a page in a text or teacher's
manual, or to compare the text to the curriculum to see where it fit and
where it needed to be modified.

Kelley

"We must be the change we wish to see in the world."
-Gandhi

> So do your kids know how to compute an average, and where
> did they learn, and where should they learn it if not in
> math class? Is it the job of math class to teach average
> and arithmetic, and if not, where are kids going to learn it?
>
> I'm astonished by this "kids already walk into school
> knowing this stuff already, it's so obvious" attitude.