OK, so they have the wonderful new progam here (I always groan at the wonderful new program) and they have had special training sessions for all the teachers in the province, and even special training sessions for the parents.
So we get to the part of the Grade 8 book where they are introducing algebraic manipulations of numbers and letter with parentheses:
(3n - 2) + (5n - 6)
(2 - 4z) - (7 - 3z)
In the book there is a whole lesson about using manipulatives, boxes to represent unknowns or variables and chips to represent numbers, and some system about the negatives. There are all sorts of pictures for guidance, and exercises where the student is supposed to work with them.
The teacher totally ignored all this and just assigned the written problems for homework.
In fact he didn’t even explain how to add and subtract negatives, or if he did he spent about five minutes total (I know because I’ve been helping this kid with his work; less than a week ago they did the unit on graphing, and they are now thirty pages ahead of where they were less than a week ago).
So much for all the high hopes and reform of math teaching.