TORONTO

It gives a whole new meaning to, “You do the math.”

Recent Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) test results confirmed what math savvy parents have been saying.

Their kids can’t do the basics. When smart kids stumble over simple arithmetic and don’t know their times tables, you don’t need a formal test to set off the alarm bells.

Some call it new math, some call it Discovery math. Others use more derogatory ways to describe a curriculum they say is too complicated and uses convoluted methods to teach simple math.

When she was teaching, now-retired Hamilton teacher Teresa Murray noticed her own kids started to have problems in math.

She got angry. She couldn’t afford the high cost of math tutoring and realized the instruction her children were getting at school wasn’t working.

“Too many children weren’t learning basic math,” she said in an interview recently.

Simple arithmetic, decimals, fractions, percentages and integers weren’t being taught in a thorough and consistent fashion, because kids were spending too long on complicated problem-solving.

“I’m not saying there’s no room for doing interesting things once in a while, but if you’re going to do some of these activities it should be within the foundation of math,” said Murray, who now tutors student in math herself.

Dr. Anna Stokke is a math professor at University of Winnipeg who’s been critical of new methods of teaching math.

She questions Education Minister Liz Sandals’ claims that students in this province can do the basic math — they just can’t apply those skills.

Stokke suspects the EQAO results may have actually inflated scores, because Grade 6 students were allowed to use calculators.

“You can’t possibly say a student can do arithmetic or know their times tables if you have given them a calculator to do it,” she said in an interview.

The professional development Sandals’ announced will only be helpful if it’s evidence-based.

“When you’re giving the money to people who have been giving the PD sessions in the past that have already caused these problem and you are saying, ‘Here fix this problem’, you’re just getting more of the same,” she said.

There’s been a move away from teaching math basics to kids across North America for the past decade, Stokke said.

“People think they want to teach creativity and problem-solving and all that sort of thing from the top down.

“Those are all really good things. We want students to be able to problem solve and think creatively, but they can’t do that unless they have a solid foundation to work on,” she said.

Three years ago, she and other math professors started the Western Initiative for Strengthening Education in Math (WiseMath). They were successful in petitioning the Manitoba government to have times tables and standard arithmetic teaching restored to the curriculum.

Part of the problem, she said, are the “terrible textbooks,” this province uses.

“The big focus is on using multiple strategies for coming up with simple arithmetic,” she says.

Stokke uses the example of multiplication tables. If a child is asked to calculate 8 x 7 and doesn’t know the answer, the new math teaches them complex methods to come up with the answer.

They’ll be told to calculate 4 x 7 — and then double the answer.

A better curriculum is Jump Math — an Ontario-based program that provides teachers with more options, Stokke says.

Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies from Calmar, Alta., lobbied that province to make similar changes. Having taught her youngest daughter simple math before she started school, the medical doctor worried when the child hated the subject when she started school.

“It made a bright young girl lose confidence in her abilities and think that she is incapable of doing math,” she said.

Governments need to stop wasting money on expensive technology and get back to teaching basics she said.

“The key role of our schools is to empower our children with the fundamental skills so they can go on to problem-solve and to critically think well and if schools are not doing that they have failed our children,” she said.

“Math is a specialized field and if they don’t listen to the mathematicians in guiding our children as to how best to help our children excel at math, then they’re also failing our children.”

Meanwhile, Sandals insists the times tables are part of the curriculum.

“But it’s also in the curriculum that we want kids to understand how you would figure out the answer to multiplication,” she said in an interview.

“They should be able to figure out why 6 x 7 equals 42,” she said

“It’s the kids who can understand why who can then go on to learn to do fractions and understand and go on to learn how to make change and understand and go on to solve other real life problems,” she said.

“Yes, you need to learn basic arithmetic and that’s part of the curriculum, but we also want kids to be able to use the arithmetic, be able to use the math,” she said.

“It isn’t that it’s bad to memorize multiplication tables. Go to it and if parents want to help drill their kids that’s a great thing to do at home because the parents know the tables and can drill the kids,” she said.

All the same, parents insist this curriculum just doesn’t add up — and are asking for change.

You can sign the change.org petition by clicking here.