<p>Perhaps UCSMP is only used locally. In case it’s national, I was hoping to hear you wise CC minds share your impressions of this math curriculum, as well as your experiences with Kumon.</p>
<p>My opinion: In theory, UCSMP sounds like it should work. However, I don’t think it emphasizes the basics enough. My younger daughter was struggling terribly with math until I enrolled her in Kumon. Up until that point I thought Kumon was probably a waste of money, but results don’t lie. She was forced to learn the basics and work up from there. She became faster and more accurate. The top math students in my older daughter’s HS graduating class were long-standing Kumonians.</p>
<p>In general, I think UCSMP skips around too much and does not progress in a logical, cumulative fashion. Its “spiral” approach hasn’t worked for my children.</p>
<p>Well, my kid used the UofC program many years ago. Spiraling is a familiar term, so the program then and now are probably similar.</p>
<p>Math is what the UofC program emphasizes. Arithmetic - adding, fractions, etc. - are what most ‘basics’ programs emphasize. I think it is critically important that kids be exposed to true math in primary school, so that if they are less able to succeed at the arithmetic skills, they can still enjoy some math success. My own experience with the ‘new math’ exposed me to math concepts and prevented me from hating math class altogether (college math was no problem, but arithmetic was in grade school). The converse will also be true, that some ‘math whiz’ kids will excel at the basics (in the early grades) but have a harder time with the more abstract concepts (in high school).</p>
<p>It may be that your kids don’t mesh well with UofC math, and if that’s the case, then the Kumon tutoring is a great supplement. And though I loved the UofC math, I do think that most kids will need more practice with the basics than it requires.</p>
<p>UCSMP is a curriculum while Kumon is a private supplemental program so comparing the two is apples to oranges. There’s a decent set of math textbooks from K through lower-level undergraduate that you can download from the UK. Comes with worksheets, lessons, etc.</p>
<p>Our school system used UCSMP when my kids were in K-7. If I remember correctly, concepts are presented 5-7 times as the curriculum spirals. Our issue was that S1 was gifted in math and S2 a very strong math student who didn’t need to have concepts repeated that many times before they got them. S1 also got frustrated by the need to explain in words how he figured something out because his typical answer was “I just know it”.<br>
It seems that for both struggling and advanced math students, the curriculum doesn’t necessarily address their needs.</p>
<p>I don’t know about UCSMP, and think Kumon is a good idea for most kids, probably, because everyone can use the practice, but one of my sons who tried it for awhile was not successful with Kumon. He wasn’t struggling with math, though, in school. He seemed gifted in math and there wasn’t much going on with the math in elementary school, so I thought Kumon might be a good idea for him, since he liked math. But he kept making the same mistakes over and over (multiplication and division) and did not progress (never would get a perfect score so he could move on) so we gave up on it after a few months. He didn’t enjoy Kumon one bit. He had better luck learning on his own . He did fine, by the way, and majored in math and music – at The University of Chicago.</p>
<p>From what I know of Kumon, the program is designed to supplement rather than to enrich, so it is not suitable for math-gifted students (H was told about it by some Asian guest at a function when S was very little and looked into the program).
Kumon is good at drilling the basics, which some of the reform math programs (TERC, Everyday Mathematics, Connected Math) are not very good at. A good foundation in arithmetic is important for the more advanced math students are introduced to in middle school. S learned math largely on his own, but would report regularly what other students were learning and used to scoff at the spiraling. One of his friends complained that spiraling forced students to stop trying to figure out one unit in order to move to the next. Not having understood the math, they forgot all about it. So when that unit showed up again, they had to start all over from scratch. Instead of building on, as the curriculum expected, they just went over the same ground over and over again. Meanwhile, those students who’d gotten it in the first place were bored.
The spiraling approach is very different from that used in other countries where thoroughly learning a particular math concept is required before moving on to the next one. More topics are covered as well than in other curricula.</p>
<p>My kids hated spiraling. If you understand adding three digit numbers you don’t have to wait till next year to learn how to add four digit numbers. They had different math programs every few years it seems, but ended up with TERC. I actually liked it pretty well.<br>
Both my kids both ended up with good math sense and are much better than I am at mental math. The problem of not enough drill was easy to remedy, every teacher they had said they supplemented the curriculum with more drill.</p>
<p>the big problem with UCSMP is time: to properly and fully complete all of the exercises requires more than an hour+ of class time per day. Unfortunately, elementary schools have too much to cover to devote that much time to one subject. The second problem is teacher training: since the UofC program is different, it requires experienced teachers (in the UC program) to leverage its capabilities. btw: good luck catching up if you have to transfer to a non-UC school.</p>
<p>Thank you for sharing your insights and experiences. Our elementary school district is re-examining the UCSMP (Everyday Math), possibly looking to supplement it with a systematic emphasis on mastering basic facts, for the kids who need it. We are told our teachers are fully trained in the program, teach it properly, and believe in it. Good point about the difficulty transferring to a non-UC school. </p>
<p>For now, the mathematically gifted kids, of which my older daughter was one, are pretty much on their own to teach themselves math. They go out into the hallway with their materials, and figure it out together. My daughter was allowed to skip years of math which left huge holes in her knowledge base; she did not realize this until she hit HS. She always did very well on the school standardized tests and even the SAT, which she took in sixth grade as part of a university-based academic talent search program. In seventh grade her middle school enrolled her at the high school for honors math which is when the gaps were revealed.</p>
<p>Lots of parents in our district with kids at either ends of the spectrum now turn to Kumon, either to solidify the basics or enable their gifted kids to progress in a logical and supervised fashion.</p>
<p>Oh, UCSMP = Everyday Math. Our district uses it (you have to with our state version of NCLB) and it has a reputation for not doing a good job with the basics. Our better elementary schools supplement it with drills.</p>
<p>I have an old UCSMP curriculum from the 80s and 90s and I do like it - it has a lot of exercises in each section. I haven’t looked at new curriculum products since the mid-1990s when things were going integrated but I suspected that I wouldn’t like the newer stuff.</p>
<p>I think supplementing it is key. It reminds me of the fight over Whole Language. S1 started school when it WL was the only approach that was permitted. By the time S2 was in the same grade, the teachers had learned to combine WL with phonics. </p>
<p>I don’t think EM is necessarily bad, but it presupposes that somehow students already have a strong grasp of arithmetic that is not justified or it expects that they will learn the basics along the way. A less purist approach works best, in my opinion.</p>
<p>The mile-wide, inch deep approach to math, however, is not the fault of EM, but of state frameworks. Perhaps the spiraling approach makes things worse, but the overabundance of topics is cause by those frameworks. I looked at some of the EM modules, and did not see why a module on geometry had to be succeeded by one on statistics and estimating (or something like that, it’s been a long time).</p>
<p>True, marite. In numerous neuropsychology and learning classes taken in college and grad school, I was taught that to best consolidate learning, a concept should be repeatedly practiced with as little interference as possible from other competing concepts, until mastered. EM seems to bombard the children with new concepts (and sometimes spiraled ones) just as they are beginning to master another. I suppose that is an attempt to keep all the balls in the air at the same time, as it were. Instead, two of my non-gifted children seem to be perpetually crawling on the floor, looking for the balls they dropped!</p>
<p>Good point about the state. One of the expressed pros to EM was its supposed alignment with state standardized testing objectives.</p>
<p>My school was an early adopter of UCSMP. The local high school was one of the tester schools. I didn’t start the USCMP until 7th grade with their Middle school/high school program. I didn’t have any problems with it. Trig is spread out over several books though (Advanced Algebra, Functions, Statistics and Trigonometry, and PreCalculus and Discrete Mathematics). We never were assigned to do every single problem in the book.</p>
<p>Our district switched to EM several years ago. After establishing a baseline the first year, they supplemented with a certain amount of “math facts” drill, and additional problem solving. It is my understanding that those who are more talented in math tend to like EM, because it asks them such things as to discover multiple ways to solve a problem, rather than GIVING them “the way” and drilling on it.</p>
<p>My kids had CSMP (I am not sure if it is the same as UCSMP, or completely unrelated) in elementary school, and loved it. I loved it too - it emphasized thinking skills and problem solving instead of drills and memorization of time-tables. I believe that the skills they learned from it helped them far beyond the math classes.</p>
<p>The main problem with CSMP in my opinion was that teachers were not trained well enough to teach it. At some point in 3rd or 4th grade the kids became better at it than the teachers, figuring out formulas and patterns instead of using the trial and error approach. It was very frustrating for them when the teacher “did not get it”… Another problem was having new kids (and parents) moving into the district and having to “catch up” (the parents were usually more of a problem than the kids.)</p>
<p>Some years ago the CSMP was given up for a more standard curriculum. I am so glad that my kids fell into the “experimental” period!..</p>