Math Guidelines Don’t Add Up for Some Poway Parents : Education: Emphasis on concepts rather than computational skills irks those who fear it may slow learning for high-achievers.

Math courses in the Poway Unified School District may be on the cutting edge of instruction, but some parents fear the district is leading students over the brink.

Educators across the country have hailed new guidelines for teaching mathematics that emphasize concepts rather than computational skills as the best way to bring American students out of their slump in mathematics achievement.

But parents of high-achieving sixth-graders at Poway say the guidelines may work for some students, but not all.

“They claim that the new methods will make the kids enjoy math more, but it slows down kids that already like it and want the challenge,” said May Hsieh, whose 10-year-old daughter will start sixth grade at Twin Peaks Middle School in September.

Hsieh, whose oldest daughter graduated from Poway High School last year and was accepted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other Poway parents see no need to change a system that has done well in instructing their children.

“They have a program in place that has worked well in the past, especially for high-achieving kids. The fans of the new curriculum would lead you to believe that the traditional style of teaching is all rote and drill and oh-so boring, and it’s just not true,” said Sigrid Bundy, a Poway parent and a math teacher at San Marcos Junior High.

“We just want to continue with what works,” Bundy said.

But school district officials say that Poway math programs haven’t necessarily worked. They point to a study that tracked students from an accelerated sixth-grade algebra class through 12th grade. It showed that more than half of them dropped out of math before getting to calculus.

“At the high school level, our top math students just were not surviving. We found that there was too severe a dropout to be explained solely on a lack of interest in math,” said Romeo Camozzi, assistant superintendent in the district.

Constant drilling of computational skills wear down students and bore them with abstract ideas they don’t understand, some educators say. “What is long division, anyway? Why does it work when we take down a number?” one educator said.

But even some supporters of the conceptual math approach say the concerns of Poway parents may be justified.

“It meets the needs of a lot of students that are not being met under traditional curriculum. . . . but I’m not sure that it advances our top-end students as fast as they would under ‘traditional’ classrooms because I don’t think it has the opportunity . . . to hit all of the topics that you would normally,” said Gail Holt, a high school teacher for the San Juan Unified School District in the Sacramento area, who has developed the math curriculum there for the last two years.

The guidelines, which were adopted by the state Department of Education two years ago, have only just begun to become integrated in local school systems.

The San Diego Unified School District adopted many of the suggestions in the state framework four years ago, but has yet to fully integrate them in their schools.

“There are still a lot of teachers that feel that the main things kids need to do is memorize their times tables,” said Vance Mills, math/science program manager for the San Diego Unified School District. “Some teachers have taken it on full bore, others have just begun to try.”

The shift from traditional methods of teaching math by memorization and computation to more conceptual methods, such as writing out solutions to math problems to find out why a solution works, is at the core of standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 1989.

“We need to be a nation of problem-solvers, and the only way to do that is to not only know what to do but when to do it,” said Iris Carl, president of the Virginia-based organization.

The standards also encourage a wider use of calculators and computers by students.

“It surely is the case that they need to have the fundamentals down or (the students) can’t use the calculators right. But when properly used and really taught well, you can do more mathematics and check your results and have a better chance of getting it right,” said F. James Rutherford, chief education officer of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.

Educators at both the county and state level have praised Poway for its steps toward a new math curriculum.

“Poway is really on the cutting edge. Kids have to really be prepared to be able to cope with ambiguity and solve non-traditional, textbook problems,” said Leigh Childs, coordinator of curriculum and instruction at the San Diego County Office of Education.

“We just can’t have an elite few people going through our schools and feeling confident and positive about mathematics. That has led us into a very awkward position as a nation,” Childs said.

But Mills of San Diego Unified warns that it takes a lot of time.

“It takes a lot more time than you would ever think,” said Mills, whose district began implementing the new curriculum four years ago. “You can’t just in-service teachers in one afternoon or even one day. It takes extensive, long-term in-servicing, maybe two or three weeks,” Mills said.

The teachers who are being asked to overthrow the old style math curriculum had been raised on that curriculum, and because it worked for them, many do not see the need for change, Mills said.

“It’s the idea of them getting used to a calculator and moving through a technological age,” Mills said.