Dan Meyer was right…
One change since I left the classroom is our district has adopted a new mathematics text, California Mathematics from Macmillan/McGraw-Hill. In just one week with the text, and already I’m complaining. The text in it’s ambition to be helpful, engaging and entertaining, is constantly focused on the non-pertinent, and telling kids what they should be able to figure out themselves. It’s a beautiful proof for Dan Meyer’s admonition to “be less helpful.”
Don’t get me wrong, I have no love for Saxon Math, the text it replaced, which was at the opposite side of the entertainment spectrum (the only illustrations were line drawings), way too opaque, and moved around in a seeming random fashion from one topic to the next (they called it spiraling — I called it confusing and