When we children lived in Cambridge, Mass., I was one of the parents who taught the math club (optional, but open to all) at my children's elementary/middle school. The math-club students were mostly interested in and capable in math (a few were there only because their parents forced them). Even so, a large fraction had trouble understanding word problems.
The problem wasn't as much the individual words but rather the compact phrasing with redundancy squeezed out. For example, "Find the smallest four-digit number that is a multiple of 5, 7, and 11." Students were mostly not careful readers.
I blame the whole-language teaching of reading. The district was (and maybe still is) a fanatic proponent of this pseudoscience. The only students who could read well in my older daughter's class when she was in 4th grade were the ones whose parents had taught them to read at home. The students who relied on the school district were terrible readers, especially with multisyllable words. (I had to teach both my daughters phonics at home.)
I blame whole language because of how the math-club students seemed to approach the word problems. They would guess at the meaning of the constructions, what I'd expect after whole-language instruction, rather than reading carefully left to right one word at a time (what one learns from phonics).
The terrible reading teaching also damages the regular math instruction. Once at the public library, which is next to the high school, I saw several students in the park in front working with protractors. They told me they were measuring tree heights as part of the honors geometry course. I found their teacher and asked him what textbook they used. (I am always looking for good school geometry textbooks.)
He told me that they had no textbook. The math department's policy was not to use textbooks in the "lower grades" (9 and 10, I'm guessing) because of "learning styles"! He didn't agree with the policy, explaining that it led to 25-year-olds doing random curriculum design on their own as they hunt for worksheets on the internet. But the district's justification was that many students don't get their information from written texts.
My translation from the district's Newspeak and educational pseudoscience (learning styles, please): So many students read badly thanks to our whole-language teaching, so we won't rely on textbooks.
When we children lived in Cambridge, Mass., I was one of the parents who taught the math club (optional, but open to all) at my children's elementary/middle school. The math-club students were mostly interested in and capable in math (a few were there only because their parents forced them). Even so, a large fraction had trouble understanding word problems.
The problem wasn't as much the individual words but rather the compact phrasing with redundancy squeezed out. For example, "Find the smallest four-digit number that is a multiple of 5, 7, and 11." Students were mostly not careful readers.
I blame the whole-language teaching of reading. The district was (and maybe still is) a fanatic proponent of this pseudoscience. The only students who could read well in my older daughter's class when she was in 4th grade were the ones whose parents had taught them to read at home. The students who relied on the school district were terrible readers, especially with multisyllable words. (I had to teach both my daughters phonics at home.)
I blame whole language because of how the math-club students seemed to approach the word problems. They would guess at the meaning of the constructions, what I'd expect after whole-language instruction, rather than reading carefully left to right one word at a time (what one learns from phonics).
The terrible reading teaching also damages the regular math instruction. Once at the public library, which is next to the high school, I saw several students in the park in front working with protractors. They told me they were measuring tree heights as part of the honors geometry course. I found their teacher and asked him what textbook they used. (I am always looking for good school geometry textbooks.)
He told me that they had no textbook. The math department's policy was not to use textbooks in the "lower grades" (9 and 10, I'm guessing) because of "learning styles"! He didn't agree with the policy, explaining that it led to 25-year-olds doing random curriculum design on their own as they hunt for worksheets on the internet. But the district's justification was that many students don't get their information from written texts.
My translation from the district's Newspeak and educational pseudoscience (learning styles, please): So many students read badly thanks to our whole-language teaching, so we won't rely on textbooks.
It's a disaster.