4th Grade Math

Our daughter is Sophia. Like a lot people, we’ve been doing the home school thing since March. We’ve found a rhythm. We work.

We don’t take learning for granted. We work at it every day. Mornings. Nights. Weekends. Holidays. Summers. We don’t take vacations from learning and exploring. It’s a family commitment. Whatever one of us learns, we all learn. We teach each other.

Sophia is responsible for her work. That does not mean she is left to navigate the world of E-Learning by herself. She does the work. We go over it together. We discuss the problems. We explain the errors. If we don’t know, we search until we find the best solution. There are no excuses.

Today is the last day of assignments for students.

I’ve been exceptionally frustrated and dismayed with the volume of work assigned in these final days of school.

Perhaps it is a hereditary thread from the Poole side of our family. My mother routinely insisted there was no need to work 30 math problems of predictable similarity if you could solve, and understand, the first ten. She was not a big fan of the Department of Redundancy Department. It was not uncommon for me to take a note to school explaining why my math homework was unfinished.

“Jeffrey understands long-division and we had other things to do last night. I told him to skip the last 20 problems. Thanks, M. Griffin.”

My teacher would fold the note and place it on the desk. I was never penalized for incomplete homework.

Imagine my dismay when Sophia was asked to solve more than 50 math problems of predictable similarity each day last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

There were 20-30 math problems each day. Solve each problem in the math notebook. Solve each problem again online. Show your work and solve one problem, again, in a video to be uploaded to the virtual classroom.

Welcome to the Department of Redundancy Department.

I wasn’t happy, but she did it. All of it. We went over every problem. Twice. How ridiculous.

On to this week. Tuesday. Six word problems. Paper and online, but no video. Fine. Let’s get it done.

Imagine my surprise when a grade of 67 was posted for the assignment. My surprise was greater than you might imagine given that only about 30% of her math assignments have been graded during this E-Learning adventure. Sophia has done the work, but she has not received the credit.

I accessed the assignment. Two of the six problems were marked incorrect. I checked the math. The answers were absolutely, positively, 100% correct.

Needless to say, I was frustrated. Vikki reached out to the teacher via email and asked why the responses were marked incorrect.

Apparently… the curriculum teaches a student to “throw away” the remainder in a long-division problem. This is wrong. All the numbers matter. As I explained to Sophia, the cashier at the grocery store doesn’t get to “throw away” the coin change and only deal with the paper bills.

This is precisely why so many children, and eventually, adults, disregard details. Sloppiness is inevitable.

Inconvenient? Don’t bother.

Unpleasant? Skip it.

Incomplete? Doesn’t matter.

The exact wording in the response we received was, “If this was a question on the End-of-Grade test, her response would have been marked incorrect.”

I have news for the world. I don’t give a damn about the End-of-Grade test.

Learn something every day. Work hard. You are responsible for you. Don’t settle for mediocrity. Don’t give up. These are not testable qualities.

The universe can boast of a less-than-glorious history of failing to bother with the inconvenient and skipping the unpleasant and disregarding the incomplete.

Are we content with where we are and how we behave and what we do?

I am not. This family is not. If all we had left in the world was the remainder of a long-division problem, we would build from there. Unless, of course, all we had ever been taught to do was to cast it aside.

The rest of the email response was a lengthy explanation about how grades are calculated and directions on how to divide 100 by 6 to understand the final grade.

It was tainted with more than a touch of sarcasm.

The test is wrong and, perhaps, the corporate teaching leaves something to be desired.

We would rather Sophia learn how to accurately complete a long-division problem than to score well on a bureaucratically-ordained assessment that will have no impact on her successes and failures in the world.

We can live with that.