Renegade parents teach old math on the sly

updated 7:14 p.m. ET July 15, 2008

NEW YORK - On an occasional evening at the kitchen table in Brooklyn, N.Y., Victoria Morey has been known to sit down with her 9-year-old son and do something she's not supposed to.

"I am a rebel," confesses this mother of two. And just what is this subversive act in which Morey engages — with a child, yet?

Long division.

Yes, Morey teaches her son, who'll enter fifth grade in the fall, how to divide the old-fashioned way — you know, with descending columns of numbers, subtracting all the way down. It's a formula that works, and she finds it quick, reliable, even soothing. So, she says, does her son.

But in his fourth-grade class, long division wasn't on the agenda. As many parents across the country know, this and some other familiar formulas have been supplanted, in an increasing number of schools, by concept-based curricula aiming to teach the ideas behind mathematics rather than rote procedures.

The Math Wars
They call it the Math Wars: The debate, at times acrimonious, over which way is best to teach kids math. In its most black-and-white form, it pits schools hoping to prepare kids for a new world against reluctant parents, who feel the traditional way is best and their kids are being shortchanged.

But there are lots of parents who fall into a grayer area: They're willing to accept that their kids are learning things differently. They just want to be able to help them with their homework. And very often, they can't.

"Sometimes I'll meet up with another parent, and we'll say, 'What WAS that homework last night?" says Birgitta Stone, whose daughter, Gillian, is entering third grade in Ridgefield, Conn., next month. "Sometimes I can't even understand the instructions."

Funny, perhaps, but also a little sad. "It's frustrating," says Stone. "You want to help them. And sometimes I can't help her at all."

Still, Stone agrees that kids should be thinking differently about math. And so she doesn't interfere by teaching her kid the old ways. "I don't want to confuse her," she says.

Morey, on the other hand, feels no guilt. She says her son was relieved to learn long division. "He wants a quick and easy way to get the right answer," she says. "Luckily he had a fabulous teacher who said long division wasn't in her plan, but we were free to do what we wanted at home."

Concepts before process
And as for the concepts-before-procedure argument, she quips: "Would you want to go to a doctor who's learned about the concepts but never done the surgery? Would you want your doctor to say I had the right IDEA when I removed your appendix, though I took out the wrong one?"

Such reasoning is not unfamiliar to Pat Cooney. As the math coordinator for six public schools in Ridgefield, which over the last two years have implemented the Growing in Math curriculum, she's seen a lot of angry parents.

"I had one parent who was probably as angry as a parent could be," Cooney says. "I've had irate phone calls. Some think we're giving the kids misinformation. They think we're not doing our jobs."

One problem, Cooney says, is that parents remember math as offering only one way to solve a problem. "We're saying that there's more than one way," Cooney says. "The outcome will be the same, but how we get there will be different." Thus, when a parent is asked to multiply 88 by 5, we'll do it with pen and paper, multiplying 8 by 5 and carrying over the 4, etc. But a child today might reason that 5 is half of 10, and 88 times 10 is 880, so 88 times 5 is half of that, 440 — poof, no pen, no paper.

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