common core math

If you are expecting me to support it, you will be disappointed. If you are expecting me to bash it, you will be disappointed, too.

We have been using Math Mammoth for math for the past three years. I do not love it, but it is thorough, so I feel that we are covering our bases. It was Common Core aligned before Common Core was implemented. This program is popular with homeschoolers who do not end up shelling up big bucks for textbooks, yet get a complete curriculum.

So how does so called "Common Core math" look like? It looks like offering many different ways and tricks to solve a problem. For example, the third grade addition and subtraction review lists different mental math tricks: counting backwards, completing the next ten, etc. All these are good strategies, what's not to love, right?

Well, since I had two very different kids go through the same curriculum, I can say what I see as the issue. My oldest, who is quite good at getting work done, reads the suggestions, implements then for that page, and then moves on. He might use them in the future, he might not. He might think about them again, he might not. Either way, he can solve those problems when they come up in real-life situations and get correct answers, which means that whichever strategy he chooses to employ works just fine, even if it's not the most efficient one.

My younger one is rigid in his approach. I know that he has better number sense than my older one, but he does not believe in himself. Having all these different approaches to try and remember and use only paralyzes him. He tries to add to the next convenient number, same as they do in this example, but to him, there is no next convenient number, so he randomly guesses: should I add three more? or four more? If I add three, that's fifteen, and if I add four, that's sixteen. And then I have to add some more... meanwhile, he totally lost track of which problem he was trying to solve in the first place. Instead of feeling that he has one solid way to solve the problems, maybe a but clunky and inefficient at time, but the one that will solve them correctly every single time, he feels that there is some unknown magic in picking out a good strategy and then arriving at the right answer.

I wonder how many other kids are there in the classroom like him, who are able to think in one way which works for them, and who are bewildered by all the choice and options. Speaking of choices, in the above example, I was solving coffee change problem differently from the author. I still got the same answer. I would take away four dollars, and get 14$ and then take away 30 cents and get $13.70.

By the way, maybe by doing many. many problems "the old way" and really feeling that you know what goes on is a start to be motivated to find shortcuts and easier solutions? I doubt that many students dutifully subtracted 1999 from 2000 and never wondered what on earth is going on. I think many of them simply wrote "1" in the answer line, only to have teacher grade it as incomplete and be told to show their work, while they mentally figured out the "new math" trick.

I was in Russian school learning my math. Russian math is not known for its flexibility or user-friendliness, but the idea behind it all was that first you drill and practice till you are fluent, and then you can spend time thinking and understanding. I remember being in 6th grade and spending time on the bus thinking about positive and negative numbers, how they add up and cancel each other out. I am pretty sure we were doing much higher math at the time, but since I felt so safe and confident in those properties, I could just mentally play with them.

Then came 10 yo's long division. Now I am confident in my ability to carry it out, but it always leaves me with that teeny wobbly bit because in Russia we were taught to set it up a bit differently than in the states.

Europe[edit]

In Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Romania, Turkey, Greece, Belgium, and Russia, the divisor is to the right of the dividend, and separated by a vertical bar. The division also occurs in the column, but the quotient (result) is written below the divider, and separated by the horizontal line.

    127|4    
   −124|31,75
      30
     −28
       20
      −20
        0

I hope that you feel just that tenny bit of anxiety looking at this set-up, and you understand that teeny bit that I feel when faced with American way.

When Math Mammoth introduced it, it was fine, and he practiced, and he got it. Then, this year, they decided to reinforce that division is just multiple subtraction. The way it was set up, it took me a few minutes to figure out what they were driving at! And let me assure you, nobody divides like that, not for any good reason that I can think of.


To check my hypothesis, I tried doing this problem mentally, and I showed it to my husband. Both of us estimated, but neither felt that the suggested approach is the one that we would use if we encounter such a problem (and total lack of paper and pencil to solve it!)

So, yes, Common Core math could be good and could be useful, but I do not think that expecting every student to learn and use every single technique is realistic. Moreover, it is discouraging to students who do not "get it", and confuses the students who like knowing that they already have a tool to tackle the problem.

what it takes to homeschool

I usually don't do this, but if you are contemplating homeschooling, thinking that homeschooling is not for you, and, especially, if you are in the trenches and despairing, this blog entry will make your day.

Here it is:

http://amongstlovelythings.com/why-im-no-homeschool-superstar/

I don't know who the author is, and I have not read any of her other entries. But this one is a sanity saver must read.

accidental find (photoblog)

This is what happens when I have an activity scheduled just for 10yo (homeschool day at Anne Frank exhibit) in a part of town where we usually don't go. I sort of looked at the map and saw two local parks, figuring one of them should have a playground. The younger kids insist on bringing their bikes, so we end up driving to the park with paved trails. We have never been there before, but we had time and were open to new experiences.

watching the ducks 

skipping stones

blue heron

goose feather

watching waterfowl

I always wonder: couldn't we do this if we weren't homeschooling? Couldn't we come here on a Sunday? But do we end up taking half a Sunday just to wander around and discover a new park?

I fret about wasting learning time. Then I see that they are learning and watching and observing and feeling, especially near a peaceful lake on a beautiful day. I see 8 yo calm down and focus. I see him observe. I see him wait patiently.

We all just need free mornings to go out there and explore nearby nature places. We all need rippling lake surface. We all need to be quiet enough to hear the calls of the birds and not to scare them off.  We all need freedom to just go out there, bike, and teach our kids to skip stones.

creative mess

Look at this neat Montessori classroom: every object has its place, and every kid is working nicely with only one manipulative at a time, then cleans it up before taking out the next one... Which mother hasn't swooned over the beauty of the set-up, the clean lines, the perfect choreography to make this all work, the obedient kids who would never dare throw an object across the room or mix the materials?

It's such a dream, you know, especially for those of us whose houses are in a constant state of disarray.

I stayed home this Yom Kippur with 1 yo while my husband took the three older ones to shul. Most of the toys that are in my living room/playroom are for 1 yo. We have a wooden kitchen which we use to store bins with the toys. The toys are: a big bag of Mega blocks and a Mega Blocks car; a bin of train tracks and wooden building blocks, a  plastic cube sorter toy, two puzzles, and a bin with tea set. It is not a small amount of toys, but it is not that large, either. Usually I do not watch closely how 1 yo plays with his toys, but I do find a lively mess of everything being dumped out either by nap time or by bedtime. I often despair of cleaning it all, just to know that it will all get dumped again a few short hours later. 

I have pared down. I have thrown things out or rotated them or banished them to the basement. I live in that perfect Montessori classroom fantasy, thinking that if only I was organized enough, my children would be just as neat as those kids in the picture.

But this Yom Kippur, as I laid on the couch, I got to observe firsthand what 1 yo actually does with all those toys.

First thing, he took the whole bag of Mega blocks and dumped it on the floor. He enjoys the sound of so many things hitting the wooden floor. Then he started stacking them up. Then he figured out that he can attach Mega blocks to the handles of a push toy because the openings are the same diameter as the tops of Mega blocks. He built long drooping towers poking from the handles. Then he took the pieces from one of the wooden puzzles, dumped them all out and loaded them into the car. He pushed that around for a bit, then turned the car upside down to unload the shapes.

Then he dumped out the tea set from a solid plastic bin, and filled it up with Mega blocks. He climbed onto the couch  and tried dragging the bin with him. I helped out. He tried building with blocks on the couch, but the surface was not too sturdy. Then he dumped out the whole bin onto the couch, but there was not that satisfying sound of blocks hitting a hard surface. He started throwing them off the couch onto the floor, one by one. One of them hit a toy xylophone and produced a melodious tone. He started aiming in that direction.

He dumped out all the train tracks and started throwing them into the toy oven. Then he tried climbing inside, but it was not comfortable, sitting on all those wooden pieces. He climbed into the nearby compartment instead and worked hard on closing the door behind him.

He stuffed some blocks into the couch. He built and destroyed multiple times. He made a tremendous mess. He is obviously learning about what fits into what, and he is getting some kind of kick of placing the toys inside and then dumping them out.

I watched and thought: if I did not have all these toys out and available to play, he would surely not stay busy for as long as he did. If I made him clean up after he played with each toy, he would not be combining them in those crazy combinations. And if I spent so much time agonizing over how messy the room would look at the end, I would not be able to observe what he was doing while happily making this mess.

How many times, when the kids get older, we hand them a blank piece of paper and tell them to be creative: write up something, draw up something, fold up something new? How many times we expect them to make something wonderful out of a box, or a roll of toilet paper, or some paper scraps when we always give them only one set of preselected materials and extol them not to make too much of a mess? And then, one day, we expect them to combine random materials and make something totally new and amazing?

So here is to messy playrooms, mixed-up toys and creative kids. Here is to parents who will dare to put their kids' need to explore before their need for a "presentable" house. Here is to keeping that insatiable curiosity of a toddler alive in much older kids (and adults).

In case you are wondering, I do clean up those Mega blocks with 1 yo every time he goes to sleep. We sing "clean up" song, and he dumps them into the bag. He likes to put each block into his mouth first and then let it go right over the bag. He is also very tempted to dump the entire bag once it is full. But we do a basic clean-up.

viduy

Some days I wonder: why do we homeschool? Wouldn't they all be better off in their respective classrooms, with peers and trained teachers? They certainly wouldn't be spending their time flying remote control helicopters, bickering, reading random pieces of paper lying around, doodling...

And then we have a good experience, and I know that it could not have happened if they were in school.

Last night I talked on the phone to a mother of a former classmate of 10 yo. She was consulting about potentially homeschooling her son; the bullying situation in school got unbearable and the child did not want to go to school in the morning. Moreover, the bullying was done by a kid who was supposedly a good friend, which made it even more devastating.

I sort of told it over to my 10 yo, telling him to watch out for this boy in shul, and to be nice to him. His response: "Why would they bully him? He even wears the same kippa as everyone else, not like me!" Oh, I so wish that everything would be that easy, and that every kid would look around and see no faults in others.

Today I finally sat 10 yo down to go over Yom Kippur Amida. Being an insane person (or overly ambitious), I have just given a class for women on the basic structure of Yom Kippur davening, so it felt funny that I prepared and taught this material to others, while my kid would be in the dark.

He had seen Rosh HaShana Amidah, so the beginning parts were easy. He chose to use Metsudah machzor which has translation side by side. I pointed out the differences in the Kedushat Hayom, and he sort of listened, sort of rolled his eyes. Then we got to viduy. He said, I know what it is: ashamnu, bagadnu... I read and translated the preliminary bit, and then he read each word of the acrostic. I focused on how Hashem knows everything, and how we might not even be aware that we have sinned. We read over most of the rest of viduy, and he got very serious and very sad. I saw that he was taking this all close to heart. I explained that Hashem forgives our sins, as long as we confess them sincerely. Hashem erases our sins, and they lift like smoke. He was teary-eyed, and he said that he is aware of how many mean things he has done. I told him to remember that sincere teshuva is accepted. I also told him that people who used to sin and then stop and repent are held in higher regard than people who never sinned.


I was starting to think that maybe I overdid it with viduy, until it was time to go to Costco, and the boys returned to their old cheerful selves, ramming each other with the carts. At that point, I was almost wondering whether any of this stuck, until he asked me, later on in the day, wouldn't it be embarrassing to recite viduy out loud, so that everyone would hear your sins? I said that people say it in unison, not too loudly, unless one's sins are well-known, and then they can be recited.

I do not know whether going over viduy is on a curriculum for 5th grade yeshiva. That brought me back to a question asked by a parent last night: how do I test my kids to make sure they are keeping up? I said that I do not do testing beyond state requirements, and I do not worry about keeping up. I worry about the level of each individual child. I felt that 10 yo is ready to be familiarized with the structure of Amidah, and that he was ready to take a closer look at viduy. What I do know, if those boys who are so abusive to her son would have had a sincere experience of sitting down with a parent, going over viduy, and thinking how their actions affect others, and how they will have to ask for forgiveness in just one more day, I bet the bullying situation would not have been so bad.

In the meanwhile, I ache for this boy and his intolerable situation. I ache for my kids who are not getting the calmest parent and the best education possible. I ache for the dayschool system which does not allow kids to blossom outside of a very narrow definition. I ache for the kids who will go into Yom Kippur and come out exactly the same way because nobody took the time to make it meaningful. I ache for mothers who resent having their kids home the whole Yom Kippur. I ache for the mothers who will try to make Yom Kippur meaningful, yet will feel that they do not live up to some impossible standard of self-sacrifice if they do not manage to daven AND feed everyone AND break up the fights AND keep the kids quiet because daddy came home to take as nap.

I ache for the sin of superficiality pervading Jewish community.

May this Yom Kippur strip all the veneer and reach deep into your heart.

suddenly, a dress!

So a Jew and a Catholic fall in love with the same dress...

No, this is not a beginning of a joke, it's a beginning of a nice story.

I have a homeschooling friend, Talitha Seibel. We met through our homeschool coop, which is very open and diverse, but also very respectful of people's differences and diversity. I am an unapologetic observant Jew and she is a new Catholic, as in, a Catholic by choice.

Now, what would a nice Jewish girl have in common with a Catholic lady?

Well, we have homeschooling (chuck it up to being weirdos). We have children who are no typical, and we are not shy to share that with the world. And we also have this whole dressing modestly thing. Talitha is a great seamstress and a DIY kind of person. She fearlessly walks into thrift shops, walks out with other people's trash, and, with a few snips and tucks, converts it into treasures. She has a great sense of style. But she is also into dressing modestly: old-fashioned bathing suits, skirts, and classy style.

Which brings me to the dress.

I haven't gotten any new clothes for Rosh haShana. I missed the deadline for dropping off my sheitel for its semi-annual wash and styling. I was feeling not very pretty going into this Yom Tov. On erev Rosh HaShana I opened my facebook page to see Talitha post a whole bunch of dresses for sale. And one of those caught my eye: knee-length, elbow-length, belted, and with a pretty neckline.

The reason Talitha resorts to selling dresses online has to do with her other belief: her family is gearing up to become foster parents. Talitha has four children of her own and a modest house, yet she feels strongly that she has space in her heart and in her life for those kids aching for a normal environment. The only space Talitha lacks is the actual physical space for those kids. Most of us would sigh at this point and say, oh well, not meant to be. Not Talitha; she and her husband Travis are building an extension to their house to make space for these foster kids. Talitha's crafts offset the costs of such construction. In fact, being DIY types, they have built everything themselves, a feat which I cannot begin to comprehend.

So the dress was there, and the money would be going directly to a good cause. The only question was: will this dress fit me and make my Yom Tov?

I drove over to try it on. As we pulled in front of the house, the boys asked me: not the one with the cross? I said, yes, that's the one. I also said, they know we are Jewish, and they are very respectful of that. And so it was: I came in, looked at the dress and it fit me well. No proselytizing took place, just some feather sharing among the kids.

I was elated to have a sudden Yom Tov dress. I got compliments over Rosh HaShana and I loved how it sat on me. I was thanking Talitha and her sense of both style and modesty for such a great addition to my wardrobe. In fact, I put the dress on on Sunday just to get this picture.

If you would like to see what Talitha has in store, please click on this link:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1245408022&sk=photos&collection_token=1245408022%3A2305272732%3A69&set=a.10203695757734873&type=1
She adds new items as they become available and removes the ones sold.

learning life skills

"You are homeschooling? You must be so organized."
"What do you do to make sure that they hit all the milestones and reach the standards?"

If homeschooling was all about academics and making sure that they are doing just as the school kids are doing, then I would really have to worry. No, I am not so organized. I juggle a lot of logistics, but I am ridiculously flexible, go-with-the-flow-or-become-insane person nowadays. In our state, we have to take standardized tests only once every three years, and I have no desire to test my kids against some outside standards more frequently.

Homeschooling is about so much more.
_________________

"Why is he kicking lawn chairs?"

"He is angry and upset."

"Can I show him how to burn his anger?"

"Yes, but he needs to express it on paper first."

He goes out with a piece of paper, a lighter, and an aluminum pan. I taught the older one about literally burring his anger up, and he did it, twice, with very calming results. The younger one will not write out his anger, will not draw it. That's why I did not suggest it to him, thinking it would not be effective. I watch as the older one explains to his brother his proposition. I see younger one furiously slashing at a paper with a pencil, his hand jerking back and forth. They rip it into shreds, then place them one by one into a pan, where the flames lick them up. Their younger brother brings a dry leaf, they laugh and stick it in.

Then they come into the house for some vinegar. 8 yo is excitedly telling my how they carved an angry 8 yo out of chalk and now they will dissolve him. (I taught them this week in geology how chalk is limestone, and how caves are dissolved cavities in limestone. It was my suggestion to drip some vinegar onto chalk, and that knowledge came in handy.) They run outside, in high spirits.

______________

10 yo made "Happy Rosh HaShana!" in Minecraft using stone blocks. 4 yo taught herself how to spell simple words like "zoo", "cat" and "dog".

_____________

10 has been coming to me lately, frustrated that his younger brother has a significantly larger amount of allowance than he does. I have not been censoring what the kids spend their money on, but his biggest hit was a dental bill at the beginning of the summer. After having a second tooth pulled due to poor brushing habits, I put my foot down and said that when that bill comes in, 10 yo will be responsible. He gulped, but he did pay it up. Of course, by now he does not remember what else he spent his money on, just that his brother is way ahead.

10 yo kept asking about what kind of jobs he can do to earn money. The problem with being a bit spacey is that every responsibility that I assign him tends to be half-done, or abandoned in the middle, hence, he does not get the payout. I was getting frustrated with all the creativity that was required of me, and lack of effort on his part, so, in the middle of Yom Tov cooking, I suggested that he do some research to see what jobs would be appropriate for a kid his age.

Half an hour later, he came back, saying that he has some leads, and that he found some things that appeal to him: a worm farm, a lizard farm, aising minnows, and taking selfies to sell to companies for advertisement "although, Mom, I don't think I will be doing that". I asked, how does one make money on a worm farm. He said that you sell the worms to fishermen, or to gardeners. I asked him whether he knows anyone in need of worms, and he said that he is not sure.

He also looked up rates for lawn mowing, leaf raking and snow shoveling. Where we live, the snow shoveling is pretty much out of question, but de-icing driveways is a real possibility. He also said that if, in addition to shoveling snow, one brings rock salt, one can charge extra for that.

He also came up with the idea of selling baked goods. That one would be fine, except that I am not so sure how it would work, kashrut-wise. I also said that people are more likely to buy baked goods as a fundraiser than as a money-making venture. He said that he can donate 10% to the new shul. By the way, the kids emptied out their tzedakah boxes, counted the money, and designated its destination.

As Team Yardo left to rake our lawn, I slowly exhaled. There might be a worm farm in our future...

_______________

What I do know, homeschooling is directly responsible for all this freedom to think and to act, and to develop skills which are important out there in the real world.