I’ve had three kids go through the early grades with it. I was on the fence at first. It turned out to be awful. The kids hate it. We hate it. There’s weird unhelpful bullshit vocabulary everywhere (“let’s use ‘number sentence’ in kindergarten before we’ve taught kids what a regular sentence is, that’ll surely help!”). Solving the same problem five ways which is infuriating to a kid who “gets it” already and has been very harmful to their opinion of school in general. Their deeper mathematical understanding doesn’t seem to be any more advanced than mine was in elementary school, which was supposed to be the point, and we’re having to supplement the “bad” stuff like multiplication tables so they’re not lacking the very most important math skills in every day life and needed to make actual progress on wrapping one’s head around even simple stuff like, say, algebra involving fractions.
Terrible, way worse than even my more-pessimistic guesses would have been.
I’ve had three kids go through the early grades with it. I was on the fence at first. It turned out to be awful. The kids hate it. We hate it. There’s weird unhelpful bullshit vocabulary everywhere (“let’s use ‘number sentence’ in kindergarten before we’ve taught kids what a regular sentence is, that’ll surely help!”). Solving the same problem five ways which is infuriating to a kid who “gets it” already and has been very harmful to their opinion of school in general. Their deeper mathematical understanding doesn’t seem to be any more advanced than mine was in elementary school, which was supposed to be the point, and we’re having to supplement the “bad” stuff like multiplication tables so they’re not lacking the very most important math skills in every day life and needed to make actual progress on wrapping one’s head around even simple stuff like, say, algebra involving fractions.
Terrible, way worse than even my more-pessimistic guesses would have been.