I have seen you mention using mathbooks from around the 1950’s. You use them for problem solving. What are the books? Thanks, rebecca
Re: question for victoria-math textbooks 1955
LOL, Victoria, your post reminded me of my 8th grade teacher. I was the unfortunate product of “new math” in the latter 1960’s. Basically I didn’t learn anything for about 3 years in school and my mom would throw her hands in the air trying to help me. She called it all “gibberish”.
On the first day of school in 8th grade, my teacher gave us several math problems to complete. No one in the class could do them. She was dramatically angry about it, said it wasn’t our fault, then with a great flourish picked up the garbage can and walked around to each of us with the order to toss our math books into it.
She brought in new math books by the end of the week. They were from the 1950’s. That was the first year since about 4th grade that I felt competent in math.
I have been collecting and treasuring the series that I was taught with in elementary school, “Arithmetic We Need”, I think published by Ginn. This is the one that presents all ideas and topics in a relatively real story-based format, and has very few pages of pure drill. If you just multiply the prices by 10 it makes good sense.
There is also a very old Scott-Foresman series from the 1940’s. “Studying Arithmetics” (yes, the s is there). This one has nifty cartoons where students discuss many alternative ways to solve the same problem (No, it is not a new idea!).
I also have a few old Ontario texts, a variety of high school texts, and others. Hit your local used bookstores and see what treasures are there.