During these review exercises, I found I was not at all satisfied with my daughter's level of proficiency with the basic addition and subtraction math facts; she was still using her fingers. This finger-counting is a product, I believe, of her experience in the public school system.
Our local school is lauded for it's high API (Academic Performance Index), yet in our state (Alabama), benchmark testing for kindergarten and first grade is restricted to reading proficiency. The unintended consequence of this emphasis on reading is that math is neglected in some cases. Teachers at these youngest grades will be held accountable for poor reading performance, but not poor math performance. My daughter was routinely handed one-digit addition worksheets, with random problems. From what I can glean, this involved minimal, if any, formal instruction, and after several months, subtraction never even made it on the menu. So meanwhile, with our excellent place value units since homeschooling, my daughter can add 6+40 without a moment's hesitation. But 6+2? Finger time.
Finger-counting isn't all bad; counting objects is the foundation of addition. But at this point in the game, a child should be able to add 2+4 without that crutch. Similarly there are criticisms of much of an emphasis on memorization. How can you be assured of comprehension if the child is just parroting back the "right answer"?
To answer this question I hit the almighty YouTube where Maria Miller, author of my math curriculum of choice, "Math Mammoth", very directly explains a happy medium. Memorization born of structure and pattern that children can visually observe in "fact families". Consider all the possibilities for a sum of 6:
Brilliant! So why was my daughter being thrown random addition worksheets for three months, using an expensive curriculum? Why isn't this method used in our public schools? Why isn't this math curriculum, sold for a whopping $30 for a year, something a public school can consider in an age of tight education budgets?
Miller explains to me that the requirements vary so much from state to state, and even district to district, that it is impossible for a small-time educator such as she to accommodate the various demands. Only big brand curriculum, like Saxon Math, can morph at will to mesh in with the bizarre and ever-changing requisites of government-run education. This flexibility comes with a major price tag.
Meanwhile, she says, many teachers are purchasing her curriculum for classroom use in any case, deviating from the norm in the interest of giving children a quality education in mathematics.
I remember my mother, a teacher of twenty years, telling me the state of California had a "phonics/whole language pendulum". Occasionally the pendulum would find a sweet spot in the middle, but sooner or later, the pendulum would inevitably swing too far one way or the other, to the point of banning the use of phonics or whole language instruction in the classroom. In either case, teachers of merit would have to smuggle materials utilizing the unfavored method like academic contraband.
How ridiculous.
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