Friday, February 23, 2007

Crap Plus (Core Plus Mathematics Project) Review 2 Thumbs way down

Heads up on Crap-Plus

I grided my loins to peek at the rest of the Crap (Core Plus)textbook they gave my kids. It's sooooo big that the first year issplit up into two books. They only cover the first book, so itsays "algebra" and "triginometry" on the cover. Guess what's notinside? No basic algebra, and they use a TI-83 computer program to doROTATION but they don't introduce sines and cosines? You can't rotatesquat without trig.Trig isn't until the SECOND book. No logs at all.

My 8th and 9thgrader don't have a clue a to what the log of 100 base 10 is. (answeris 2) I haven't explained to them what the SIN key does on acalculator either. (I'll tell them when they get older)They've got markov's something or other, and 15 different kinds ofcorrelations. I'd judge that 99% of people on this list who didn'tget an engineering or statistics major have never seen 85% of thecontent.

An engineering major like me as actually seen translationand rotation done with a matrix, but it's nothing I ever needed toknow before college calculus. None of this stuff will be at allhelpful on the SAT, and you're dead if you don't have a TI-83. Mykids tell me an TI-84 will work, but not any other TI calculatorsince more advanced models don't have the GEO!@#$% program on itanymore that's key to about 75% of the investigations. They covervolume and area (but don't tell you what the formula is....)

There is no arithmetic or algebraic manipulation anywhere, it's allpunch out this sequence on your $120 calculator. We didn't adoptcalculators in our high school until 4 function square rootcalculators fell below $30 in 1976. Now they require $120 calcultorsto learn... nothing at all.This matches the Mathematically correct study where this girl who gotstraight As and all of her classmates were flunked into remedial mathin college, and the neighboring school dumped crap plus right away.Comments were something like we learned how to run everything on theTI-83, and not much else.Fortunately, traditional middle school math is pre-algebra andfirming up arithmetic, but if that UW prof thinks McDougall Littellwas scatter brained, this stuff is the worst.This is the textbook that starts out introducing matrixes with twopages of .... Reebok and Nike. And when you finishthe "investigation" on page 3, you find out you're just filling in a2D table, just like in 4th grade WASL math, and they call it amatrix????

My introduction to matrices was the Matrix ROM on the HP 9830computer which was designed for college-grad engineers. McDougallLittell was doing something similar "Use matrix multiplication tocompute Sally's bake sale proceeds". Who in the !@#$% uses matrixmultiplication to compute receipts????

This is all about bragging about raising standards 10 grade levelsahead when the PROBLEM is why their basic skill levels are 4 gradelevels behind! Core-Plus is designed to be used by ALL 9th graders,from remedial to advanced, so we'll have kids who can't add 12.1 +13.56 trying to explain what matrix you have to multiply to get theidentify matrix, and what key to punch to get there. (What, you don'tknow what TI-83 key to punch??? You don't deserve to pass the WASL!)I'm going to try to do a video review, wish me luck.

No comments: