LAKE COUNTY — Area educators are evaluating, for the first time since 2001, a new list of K-8 math textbooks adopted by the state this month to determine which titles teachers will use next year and how their curriculums might change.
Lake County school district officials, school administrators and teachers have begun the process of assessing their curriculum and determining if any of the 41 new state-approved texts will be used in Lake County next fall.
“Our district is following the state”s math adoption for K-8 and algebra,” said Erin Smith-Hagberg, Lakeport Unified School District Superintendent. “We have a county-wide committee, and our district is participating. It is a committee that is putting together teachers and trying to narrow down the texts to look at. Tim Gill with the Lake County Office of Education is the county liaison. He has started the process and already has had one meeting.”
The new textbooks were approved Nov. 8 by a California State Board of Education panel that included math teachers. Kathlan Latimer, a program consultant with the California Department of Education and a former third grade teacher, was appointed to the panel that adopted the new math materials.
Latimer said the state adopts new texts every seven years, and while California”s student”s math learning levels have risen, the latest adoptions will align even closer to the high standards in the state.
“I think this new set of books is even more in tune with the standards we have set. Students need an opportunity to understand the math concepts at the elementary level. Instead of galloping though, the materials need to provide a basic foundation for them to build upon,” Latimer said.
Like a language, learning math requires more than memorization. “Before you memorize the multiplication tables, you have to understand what two times three means. Then you can begin to memorize, and move on to ease and fluency, and then to automaticity,” Latimer said.
As part of the state-wide adoption, elementary school teachers in California will be allowed to use state funds to order adaptations of math textbooks that were developed by Singapore”s Ministry of Education that helped students there rank first in the global study “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study” in 1995, 1999 and 2003.
The study is conducted every four years.
The state Board of Education included the adaptations, or “Standards Edition” titles, published by Singapore-based Marshal Cavendish International in this month”s adoption after receiving a list of recommended textbooks from the state”s Curriculum Commission.
The “Standards Edition” textbooks replace Singaporean dollars and cents with U.S. currency, Singaporean proper names and various British spellings.
Teachers in Singapore deliver classroom instruction in English, according to Jeffrey Thomas, president of the textbooks” North American distributor, SingaporeMath.com Inc.
“The presentation is astonishingly clear and child-friendly, yet is mathematically sophisticated,” said Thomas Parker, a professor of mathematics at Michigan State University. “Students learn through carefully-designed problem sets. By grade six, the Singapore texts are one to two years ahead of U.S. texts, and the students are extremely well-prepared to start algebra.”
Contact Elizabeth Wilson at ewilson@record-bee.com.
