Go back to the old ‘how-to’ model

I applaud one of the key points made in your recent editorial regarding Washington’s education system — it earns a big fat “F” for failure in mathematics. But rather than pouring additional millions of dollars into the existing system, I suggest a more straightforward approach:

Ditch the entire “inquiry-based math” curriculum!

Last year, as my youngest daughter wrestled with junior year mathematics, I discovered exactly how bad this curriculum is. I minored in mathematics, taking numerous courses in calculus, statistics and matrix algebra, but I couldn’t figure out how to solve a single problem using her textbook.

I spent hours re-reading that textbook. I scoured the school’s Web site. I did everything I could think of. No use. My daughter’s struggles had become my own.

Her teacher explained that the “new model” emphasized students “discovering” how to solve the problems, rather than having the problem explicitly modeled for them in the textbook. Back when I learned math, I was given concepts that led to examples showing how those concepts would be applied to solve specific problems.

Seems like common sense to me, but obviously not to our state’s education officials, who seemingly remain tied to a program that produces train-wreck results.

So my suggestion is: Rather than pour additional millions of tax dollars into a curriculum that is in my opinion horrendously and irrevocably broken, let’s instead head over to Half-Price Books and purchase truckloads of math books from the 1970s or ’80s. Hopefully they work off an instructional model that makes sense.

And as long as we’re doing that, we ought to dig up the McGuffey Readers that my mom had to use during her school days in the ’30s, but that’s another letter.

Jack Turk

Snohomish