Everyday Math--Stumping Parents and Children Alike

Or at least one parent/child pair. The parent in this case is a Doctor of Pharmacy, which one presumes gives her the knowledge base to do first grade math. You can sense frustration in the story, but here is a glimpse

That's because another challenging feature of Everyday Math is the incongruity between the classwork and the homework. So while my daughter was busy exchanging money in the classroom, she was reinforcing her newly acquired skills by counting the number of clocks in the house for homework. To be fair, on a few assignments, she was asked to name the presidents on some coins and then to count a bunch of pennies-close enough.

The day before Madeline's first math test, she brought home a review sheet containing practice problems that made me wonder whether she was moonlighting at some weekend math class. We failed the first first-grade math test, which certainly came as a shock to me because how can a 5-year old child fail anything after cramming two weeks worth of work into one night. It was then that I had the privilege of speaking with the school's math coach. Cigarette in hand, I pleaded with her that in order to learn math, Madeline-like me-needs practice and repetition, preferably in the form of homework assignments that bear some sort of semblance to her class work. Thankfully, I was diagnosed by her immediately-and conveniently over the phone-as a "struggling parent with a struggling child."

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