One of my greatest failures in my first year as a teacher was my inadequate communication with parents. Upon reflection, I can see that that this failure arose from many sources. Most obviously, I lacked experience and the kind of relationships that come from spending years working in the same community. That’s not to mention the discomfort I felt when calling low-income parents during dinner hours, often to tell them that their children were misbehaving. Which led to procrastination (to be clear, this was all on me). To make things more difficult, many of the families I served lacked email addresses. As much as I’d like to say I did everything I could, it wouldn’t be the truth. Then again, you can always do more. That’s the soul-crushing thing about teaching.
If you’ve never been a teacher, it’s almost impossible to understand the time demands of the job. But here’s how I put it when I’m trying to make the point: Remember the last presentation you made for work, and all the time and effort you put into preparing for it (organizing the handouts, putting together the slideshow, rehearsing your introduction)? Now imagine that you must give three such presentations on the same day and that you can’t start preparing for any of them until 5:00 p.m. the night before.
Got it? OK, now imagine that you must repeat this process five days a week, nine months in a row.
That’s teaching (in middle and high school, at least). Early in their careers, teachers are consumed by basic demands like creating a curriculum (often from scratch), controlling their classrooms (more or less successfully), and figuring out what they will do during third period since the printer is broken again. For the most part, they don’t intend to keep parents in the dark. But that’s often what happens, because they simply can’t find the bandwidth to do otherwise.
Into this communications vacuum come the Common Core State Standards for Math (CCSS-M), a thoughtful, research-driven set of guidelines that read like the instructions for “getting the most out of” your TI-89 graphing calculator.
Have you read the sixth-grade standards on ratios and proportional relationships? You have not. (Stop lying to yourself!) But if you’re an engaged parent, you likely know that they exist and contain changes that are considered important by the proportional relationship community. Meanwhile, the math Johnny’s bringing home from school looks funny (nothing like the math you were taught), and you can tell he’s confused by it.
Heck, sometimes you’re confused by it; so it would be nice if Johnny’s teacher would proactively explain what’s going on with proportional relationships—why students are solving the same problem three different ways, why they are being asked to explain their answers in writing, and how these skills connect to the math they will tackle in subsequent grades. Unfortunately, she’s too busy fighting fires to read your mind right now.
That doesn’t mean she’s oblivious, however. And in a new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Common Core Math in the K-8 Classroom, a whopping 85 percent of teachers reported that “reinforcement of math learning at home is declining because parents don’t understand the way math is being taught.”
That’s the most worrying finding to emerge from the report (which also has plenty of positive news). But it shouldn’t be surprising given the depth of the instructional shifts that are included in the CCSS-M, to say nothing of the challenges teachers face when it comes to communicating with parents.
Fortunately, as a savvy Gen X-er who understands the Internet, you are not a mere victim of your circumstances. Which is why (in light of the survey results) I feel comfortable making a suggestion that could do wonders for everyone’s state of mind: Email your child’s math teacher. Tell him or her what’s confusing or frustrating you (or what’s confusing or frustrating your child). Ask about the goals of the assignment or approach you find confusing. Ask how you can help your child achieve those goals. If you can find the time, offer to stop by for a few minutes after school to talk things over in person. (Believe it or not, most teachers love talking to parents. After all, who else has any clue what they are going through?)
And while you’re at it, consider reading the new report, which contains lots of good information on what teachers think about the new math standards, what they are struggling with, and how things are going at the ground level, where it counts.
David Griffith is research and policy associate with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a former high school teacher.
