Betsy

I've been reading old homeschooling magazines and getting new ideas.

This is from a book review (of Family Math: the Middle School Years)
published in the California Homeschooler, April 1999, by Cathy Koos
Breazeal.

[her words]
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""I am a product of "The New Math." Any of you old enough to remember
that educational disaster?

Recently, I visited my parents' home in Pennsylvania and, while browsing
through the attic library to see what books I could score to take home,
I saw a familiar yellow paperback book. Just as an odor can evoke waves
of hidden memories, the sight of that yellow spine evoked such a strong
and unpleasant memory that I actually had to leave the room.

What was the book? None other than the 4th grade "New Math" textbook;
the very one that has tear drops on many pages. Tears shed night after
night as my Dad and I struggled to "get" the math.""
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What I realized when I read this is that one reason "New Math" failed is
that the education establishment, in its vanity, underestimated how much
teaching is done at home, by parents helping their kids with homework.
By creating a new kind of math lessons that were incomprehensible to
most parents, a lot of students were "set adrift" on some stinky creek,
without anyone to help them paddle to shore.

Anyway, I liked this idea. I think that in both school attending and
non-school attending families, huge amounts of learning take place at
home. I'm often shocked when teachers think the solution to low test
scores is to shut children in classrooms for additional hours. Yikes!

Betsy