The Math-Whizz 2009 Summer Adventure is now live!
Login to your Math-Whizz account now to get started, or visit the Math-Whizz start page, create a free account and – if you like the look of Math-Whizz – sign up!
The Summer adventure features the Whizz Professor, trying to escape the jungle with your help. You can access the summer adventure
You’ll need to solve math puzzles, explore mazes and be quick with the blowpipe to help out the Prof.
Good luck!
The Washington Post reports on an (almost) country-wide effort to draft national standards in key math and reading skills for every student from kindergarteners to high-school leavers.
A group, made up of 46 states and the District of Columbia, and led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, announced Monday that they aim to (as the WaPo reports):
…define a framework of content and skills that meet an overarching goal. When students get their high school diplomas, the coalition says, they should be ready to tackle college or a job.
There has been ongoing concern about the levels of various state math and literacy standards and whether make American students as internationally competitive as, say, Singaporean students.
This push for national standards seems to stem in part from such concerns. Margaret Spellings, education secretary in the last administration, acknowledged this: “We have a speedometer, and it says we’re going too slow.” But Spellings felt the emphasis should be on “speeding up”, rather than getting “a more precise speedometer”.
To still the beating hearts of those who maintain that states should set their own standards, it seems that the 46 states involved in the scheme will be able to choose whether to adopt the standards, once they have been defined.
Even so, there are bound to be some ideology-laden debates about what methods reading and math standards should be built around, and with the fight over ‘reform’ versus ‘traditional’ math still raging the approval process will likely not be plain sailing.
As far as we’re concerned at Math-Whizz, any effort to standardise math curricula nationally would help us provide more consistent reporting on Whizzer performance with respect to those standards.
Equally, however, the nature of our Math-Whizz Tutoring service means that every child has his or her own tailor-made math curriculum. Neither we, nor the state defines when a Math-Whizzer learns long division, say, it is his or her ability and performance that defines it.
That’s what makes Math-Whizz special, we’d like to think!
Some interesting educational research findings from ScienceDaily, and reported over at the UK Whizz Blog.
Summarized for your reading pleasure:
Learning with different mathematical methods, using old and new media, and with a teacher to tie it all together, gets the best results.
And so you have it! Math-Whizz has a huge variety of material, encourages pencil-and-paper methods, and facilitates parent-student-teacher communication. A no-brainer.
