Parents going to school to understand Common Core math
http://www.washingtonpost.com | 2014-11-03 15:43

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Jennifer Craig stared at her daughter’s fifth-grade math homework. It was a three-digit multiplication problem, and it seemed simple enough. But her 10-year-old was supposed to solve it by drawing a chart, breaking apart numbers, multiplying, adding and maybe more.

“I’m lost,” said Craig, a 31-year-old stay at home mother of three.

And that’s how she found herself in her daughter’s classroom Monday night, sitting alongside other parents in child-size chairs and listening as teacher Alyshia Thomas explained new math strategies.

Most U.S. public school students are learning math very differently than their parents did, due to Common Core State Standards, national K-12 math and reading benchmarks that have been adopted by 43 states and the District of Columbia.

The changes have confused many parents — particularly at the elementary level — leaving them flustered by a basic parental duty: Helping with homework.

Nicole Barksdale, 5, left, walks by as Maryn Butki, 11, right, a student at Scripps Middle School in Lake Orion, Mich., helps Paige Berry, 10, and Sydney Sabol, 10, both of Pine Tree Elementary, figure out the cost of ingredients for pumpkin pancakes at math night at a grocery store. (Joshua Lott/For The Washington Post)
“Almost every parent comes in and says, ‘This is not how I learned math,’ ” said Melissa Palermo, an energetic fourth-grade teacher who coaches other teachers in math at the Nathaniel Hawthorne school here.

Palermo is a believer in the Common Core, a wholesale and controversial change in American public education, because she says her students are reaping the benefits of the new standards. They are showing a more sophisticated understanding of math and are able to perform operations they otherwise wouldn’t have learned until they were older, she said.

But parents are another matter.

“The toughest part is the homework part because parents, it’s so hard for them,” Palermo said. “A lot of parents, they doubt themselves because there are all these models and things they’ve never seen before.”

Rochester is one of many school districts across the country teaching parents the new Common Core math in addition to their children. From New York to California, school districts are holding special math sessions for parents and caregivers, sending home “cheat sheets” and offering homework hotlines answered by math teachers, all in an effort to explain and demystify the new approach.

“The kids who come to us are a clean slate,” said Jennifer Patanella, an instructional coach with the Rochester public schools. “It’s the adults who have to be retrained.”

In Las Vegas, Bill Hanlon is teaching a five-month course in new math strategies to a group of approximately 50 parents.

In this Khan Academy video, instructors show how a multiplication problem can be solved via the traditional method and the area model method. The area model, which has students break numbers down into groups on graph paper, is one of the new ways students are learning math, which can be confusing to parents who learned the traditional method years ago. School systems are beginning to offer lessons that teach parents the new methods alongside their children so that they can help with homework, part of the introduction of new curriculum related to the Common Core State Standards. The video explains the steps used in each method. Video courtesy of Khan Academy at khanacademy.org.

“They’re a little frustrated because they can’t help their kids,” said Hanlon, who directs professional development for math teachers in five Nevada school districts. “One of the messages I give to teachers is that if you’re going to send home stuff that parents have not seen before, send a note explaining, this is what we’re doing and why and a couple of examples. Otherwise, you’re going to get a lot of complaining.”

Diane Dunaskiss, principal of the Pine Tree Elementary School in Lake Orion, Mich., about 40 miles from Detroit, has been looking for ways to make Common Core math relevant to her students and their parents.
Two weeks ago, her school hosted a Common Core math night for families the local Kroger’s supermarket. Children and adults were given everyday challenges requiring math operations, such as figuring out how many boxes of pasta to buy for a dinner for six if each box contains four servings.

“The new math standards are encouraging students to think deeper,” Dunaskiss said. “Part of that deeper understanding is to take what you’ve learned and apply it to what you’re doing in real life.”

A bipartisan group of governors and state education chiefs created the Common Core State Standards in math and reading in 2010 as a way to inject consistency into K-12 academic standards, which have varied wildly from state to state. The standards spell out the skills and knowledge students should possess by the end of each grade. They are not curriculum — states and school districts decide how to teach to the standards and what materials to use.
In the past, math was learned as a series of memorized facts, formulas and shortcuts or tricks. The result, experts say, is that U.S. students struggle with math. Nearly two out of every three U.S. fourth-graders and eighth-graders were not proficient on recent national math tests. The Common Core standards differ from that previous approach in that they emphasize the concepts behind mathematical operations and stress that there are multiple ways to arrive at the same answer.

In primary grades, math instruction begins with “manipulatives,” such as blocks or beads, and progresses to drawings, number lines or graphical groupings. The idea is to teach children to think about a number as more than just a symbol. The Common Core standards expect students to not just calculate the answer but to explain how they arrived at the solution. Word problems are heavily used, and that has raised concerns by some that Common Core math is particularly hard for English language learners and students with learning disabilities.

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