Does anyone also have to use MPM? Please tell me ONE redeeming quality of it or help me complain about it.
I liked it when I used it for a small class(3-4 year olds) years ago and thought it was perfect for them. It’s piss easy to use, even easier if it includes the English directions and a teacher’s book.
What are you finding fault with on it? Besides everything that is, what stands out?
[quote=“Okami”]I liked it when I used it for a small class(3-4 year olds) years ago and thought it was perfect for them. It’s piss easy to use, even easier if it includes the English directions and a teacher’s book.
What are you finding fault with on it? Besides everything that is, what stands out?[/quote]
- Workbook based.
- Doesn’t isolate the learning skills.
- The manipulative materials are crap.
Would I be wrong in assuming you have no teacher’s book or explanations in English for you? Did they get the posters and the teacher’s kit?
The kids liked what they had, little stand up men and blocks that snapped together. We also had tape that went with it that had a lot of nice English songs(the correct ones, not that Taiwanese crap shit clusterfuck chants referred to as songs here). The workbook was mostly coloring and pretty pictures that they really liked. I not being a teacher nor having taught before found it quite useful. It seems miles ahead of anything else I have seen the students do here that is math related since. I’m thinking we are looking at it from 2 different reference points and/or they have gone to shit since I last taught it 9 years ago. I was also teaching 3-4 year olds.
I think you shed some light on it for me. It is not that it is the worst thing ever, as much as I hate it. It is that I have taught a much better system.
I have taught it at 2 schools so far. The first one had NO teacher materials. That was more than a nightmare.
This school has most. If I need a poster, I can copy and enlarge it.
What I think I hate are a few things that doesn’t mesh well with me:
- It is teacher directed. My natural teaching style centers around children learning through discovery. This system almost has the teacher walking the students to the point. It is very backwards from how I am used to teaching. In my opinion, the teacher should present, the student works, then the student eventually discovers.
- Workbooks are not appropriate for this age. That just comes from my Western bias.
- The sequence seems illogical. They teach linear counting past 9 before place value. It has subtraction before multiplication. This really fucks with me head.
I think it has the most to do with me being a Montessori teacher before anything else. The materials and learning outcomes are so much different. Math and Language were my 2 strongest points in what I knew about Montessori and I used the math part here in Taiwan well. So it is hard to adjust to something that doesn’t provide the same output.
For someone with real math teaching skills it is probably not appropriate nor useful, but for the great unwashed masses teaching whether they be Taiwanese or foreign, this is as good as it gets. It sure beats the school having someone unqualified making their own material for the school, which is all too common here in Taiwan.
Have you dealt with the abacus kids yet? This was a huge bugbear for my boss from my last kindy in Taipei. They had a successful anchingban based on their ability to teach math and to a lesser extent English. If you gave them an abacus and said 2+2, they would immediately say 4. If you gave them 2 blocks, then another 2 blocks and asked how many, they’d be completely lost.
[quote=“Okami”]
Have you dealt with the abacus kids yet? This was a huge bugbear for my boss from my last kindy in Taipei. They had a successful anqinban based on their ability to teach math and to a lesser extent English. If you gave them an abacus and said 2+2, they would immediately say 4. If you gave them 2 blocks, then another 2 blocks and asked how many, they’d be completely lost.[/quote]
Not worked with that. The Montessori method does have abacuses or abaci or whatever the plural is. 
It does come as a later material though and is considered a step towards abstraction.
Would drive my boss crazy and make her test scores not look so good to get a kid who had aced the abacus “math” class, but had no real math skills.
I can see how an abacus could be useful to teach math and abstracts, but my boss’s problem was she was getting kids who just didn’t understand “math”. Talk to your Chinese teachers or boss, someone in the know and they should be able to at least turn the hatred into intense dislike for MPM. You’re just going to have to deal with it as parents want math classes, want books for the class and definitely want a workbook, and they want it to have something cute in it. Anything else is just toys and not worthwhile in their mind.
Puppet,
I was responsible for writing the teacher’s manual including all the hundreds of activities for MPM, as well doing teacher training for it in English, when the English edition first came out several years ago. Whilst I hear your pain, I hope I can at least shed some light on why it is like it is.
(I haven’t taught preschool since I had my kids so I am not sure how the materials have changed since five years ago, but I am guessing not too much.)
Many preschools in Taiwan teaching math had no materials at all, only worksheets. MPM was designed to bring more practical experience about math to children. As Okami points out, children who go to the memory math classes and so on can rattle off sums as fast you throw them out to them, but they really don’t seem to understand the basic concepts behind the equations. It was a problem for me when teaching the five year olds as children would argue they knew “everything” about math, then couldn’t understand how 3 blocks plus 4 blocks added up to 7 blocks. The system being as it is here, many teachers felt ill-equipped to handle introducing math concepts on their own using material around them. MPM is a complete program with teacher materials, individual boxes to encourage individual play, and characters to make it more fun. It’s not perfect, and teachers with training in different teaching philosophies and systems will have issue with it. Trained teachers sometimes find it offensive to have a complete system, but we also have to remember that there are many teachers who just don’t have confidence or training to prepare everything themselves. The reality is, many teachers only teach for a year or two, so the window for developing them into teachers who have all that confidence and training is really small. And if you don’t provide something for them to use, they may well choose to ignore the subject altogether.
I want to clarify, the workbooks were only mean to be done at the very end of a lesson, after children have spent considerable time working with their individual boxes of manipulatives, hearing the stories, and playing the games related to the pages. It is supposed to work like this: Experienced teachers look at the goals of the lesson and use their own methods to present and let children explore. Inexperienced teachers refer to the teachers’ books and supportive materials and use these as the main part of the, not the workbooks. When I used it in preschool classes, sometimes I missed the workbooks out completely, or we did the pages during some extra time we had during the week after playing around and discovering the math concepts. There were many activities for each theme and concept, from which teachers could pick and choose, or ignore, as they wished.
When we were using the materials, teacher training was also an important part of the program. Your school could request training from MPM staff to explain the theory and practice.
Apart from writing the first lot of English-language teacher books and manuals, I don’t have any affliation with MPM, and I did question some items in the program. As a teacher trainer in preschool, I found it at least gave my teachers some direction and support, as long as they didn’t get too caught up in the workbook part but focused on trying different ways to explore the material. Workbooks generally are to give the parents something to look at, or to help teachers with assessing how individual children at different points throughout the semester. I used to be anti-workbook, but some kids really love worksheets (my five-year-old son can’t get enough of the darned things! (and he just learned to read independently using a totally methodical method, completely opposite to my teacher training methodology).
If you see room for improvement with the program, I suggest you write to the company. They used to really welcome feedback from our teachers. As I said, I am not involved with them at all and have not used it for several years, so it might have totally changed since I used it.
Hope that helps some.
[quote]Many preschools in Taiwan teaching math had no materials at all, only worksheets. MPM was designed to bring more practical experience about math to children.[/quote]This has been my experience. If you think the MPM workbooks were bad, you should see the Chinese versions from different publishers.
Then you can get into the very deficient skills of about half of all Taiwanese kindergarten teachers. I find that the teachers from Shida’s teaching school on Hoping Rd in Taipei City are excellent. Then we can talk about foreigners who teach that have no knowledge base for teaching.
Great post Asiababy, Don’t you just love how kids learn in ways you just don’t expect, like your son.
Off-topic:
How were those teacher training classes? Most I’ve had have had the small problem that the trainer would show us things that we didn’t have nor knew existed because the school wouldn’t or didn’t buy them. It usually devolved to us sitting there while the trainer babbled on about using something we couldn’t get or use in our classes. How many times did you teach and find out that they were using photocopies?
Okami,
[quote]Off-topic:
How were those teacher training classes? Most I’ve had have had the small problem that the trainer would show us things that we didn’t have nor knew existed because the school wouldn’t or didn’t buy them. It usually devolved to us sitting there while the trainer babbled on about using something we couldn’t get or use in our classes. How many times did you teach and find out that they were using photocopies?[/quote]
Are you talking about MPM in particular? It’s hard for me to say about how it was after I stopped teaching. I was hired by MPM to do the English training, so I am a bit um, biased about the English training at the time I was teaching. I have no idea how it went after I left teaching, though.
I always emphasised the fact it’s about 10-70-20 or even 10-80-10 for the classes, that is, short introduction, long individual play and discovery, then workbook time to review. Teachers did tell me it was hard to control this time, if their allocated time to math was short. (I think this was my biggest issue with a scheduled curriculum - some teachers did not have the confidence to say, ok class is going well, let’s let it continue. They felt pressure from a timetable that was really made up for parents, not really teachers.) I also had teachers coming up and doing practice teaches or bringing their issues out to be discussed. I don’t know if they still have any staff working who are proficient enough in English to confidently work with “foreign teachers”. I do it’s REALLY hard to do training if your language skills are not strong. (I was by no means a perfect trainer, it was a BIG learning experience for me.)
Are you sure things weren’t bought? My understanding is it used to be a complete package, and if things went missing you could get them replaced. Maybe your school just stored them badly and they got lost.
Oh, yes, I have been constantly surprised. That’s what I love about teaching - children force you to step out of your box and consider so many new options.
I think Okami hit the nail on the head and you confirmed it for me: it’s much better than other options out there and great if you don’t have experience teaching math. The problem I see is that I do have a lot of experience teaching math to this age.
You also talked about the time frame. We have 40 minutes with MPM. I’m used to a 2.5 - 3 hour block of work time for the student to work, so these short 40 minute sessions I am doing with them are quite cramped and rushed.
I’m also willing to bet that the books we use are not necessarily the right books for the students. I think they possibly moved the kids to higher books just so the parents would be more impressed with a bigger number on the book.
I think my frustration originally in this thread came about because I just finished typing up next week’s lesson plans for the whole unit, saw something I was doing in MPM that made me shake my head, and it was right around the time I am working on writing my math album for 3-6 year olds with hundreds of pages of math presentations that I loved doing.
Matt
I like the boxes…works well to place between kids when they write tests(Elementaries) and my kids loved that if you place the pelican’s lower body the wrong way around it looked like a peenie.