Oh no! An unhappy customer. Ouch. OK, I collected myself and reasoned as follows:I am frustrated by the skipping around of concepts.
It seems like we are hardly building on anything or getting our hands around
a concept. I know over time we will eventually but I hate doing shapes one
day, trading units for 10 rods the next then tracing a numeral and finding
it on the chart the next. I had been reorganizing the lessons so that
for one week we did one topic and could build on it.
I love how individual lessons are taught. I greatly respect how Larry
Shiller has made math fun....and I want it to be fun. I don't want it
to be hard to grasp. I'm just not sure I'm laying the whole
foundation. I had thought of switching to Right Start Math because it
seems that there is actual building on math concepts. Any
encouragement? Any thoughts? Please help! Thank you
Mr. Shiller for all of your work. I like so much about the program, but am
frustrated in the order of the lessons. Thank you! Misty
Thank you for your kind words. I hope to address your concerns with this
response and also to replace any frustration with excitement as you help your
child on the road to math success. ShillerMath is very different from every other
math program on the market, whether it's Saxon, Math-u-see, RightStart, Miquon,
Singapore, etc. One key difference is in our philosophy, which is that
each student has his or her own potential curve and a math curriculum must provide
students with an environment that allows each of them to learn at their own
pace. We are all familiar with the classroom where a specific topic is covered in
a specific amount of time. But that's not how humans learn, even if that's how
the school bureaucracy would like them to learn. With ShillerMath it is not
uncommon for a student to go through 15 lessons in one day and then spend four
whole days on the next lesson. The student is driving the pace, only moving on
when closure has been achieved. You wrote it was you that felt frustrated by
"skipping around." But let's focus on the student if we may. If the student feels
frustrated by "skipping around" then the student is being rushed. Take a step back
and let kids do what we were all designed to do: be great learners. Define
progress not as a certain # of lessons done in a certain time but only how well
they are performing to their potential given their unique set of learning styles
and capacities. Allowing students to get closure is critical to math success, and
sometimes kids need more time (sometimes a lot of time!) to get closure even when
we feel they are ready to move on. That is what truly builds a solid math
foundation.
Other customers piped in, too. Misty made my day when she wrote back: Thank you for your encouragement and thoughtful response. We are back ontrack now! Since I was frustrated I had set the curriculum aside. Last nightwe did a fun Review test to see where we stood. Now we are going to have some math fun!
But the thought remained: how to help people do things differently to get a better result. There is so much inertia in our world. I have heard there are four stages to change: denial, resistance, acceptance, embrace. I guess like learning people just need to progress at their own pace.
