Parent CPM Math Night – Recap

Last month our Parent Topic was our Parent CPM Math Night.  Our teaching staff, led by Mr. Chang, our Math Department Chair and assisted by Ms. Peck, Ms. Schoehair and Mr. McGowan gave us an overview of our new curriculum and explained how it is different from the way we learned math all those years ago.  To be blunt, it is not intuitive for us parents.  This new method involves students experiencing math problems first and working out how they might approach a problem.  At first our parents were quite skeptical, so Mr. Chang and the team put us into groups of 4 and we worked together to solve a problem.  We each were assigned 1 of 4 roles:

Task Manager – Makes sure all parts of task are completed & all participate.
Resource Manager – Ensures all resources are available to solve problem.
Facilitator – Coordinates team members in working on problems.
Reporter/Recorder – Team Spokesperson, responsible for written & oral responses of team.

Then we received this problem to solve as a group.  We were asked to talk about how we would go about solving this problem, not with a math equation, but what process we might take.  This was so we could get an intuitive feeling of what the problem might be.  Once we did that, we were given by the math teachers math symbols and formulas to use to solve the problem.  This way we had an intuitive understanding of what we were trying to do, instead of just plugging numbers into a math equation.  It was very eye opening for all and made sense once we went through it.  No real math knowledge was needed to begin this problem and the math language and equations were introduced as we needed them.  To see the PowerPoint: Prospect HS Math Departmentv2 , Sample Problem we solved: Slope.activity and Parent Resources to help your child: CPM.Resources, click the link.