Dear fellow petitioners, Now this is very upsetting! Despite over 18,000 petitioners against the discovery math, despite repeated evidence of the approach failing our children, and despite Minister Eggen's statement about working with us to rectify the discovery math curriculum, the Alberta School Superintendents and the Alberta Regional Professional Development Consortia along with the Calgary School Board have underhandedly hired a discovery math proponent, James Tanton, to give a series of lectures to the schools in Calgary starting this Thursday! Hasn't Taunton done enough damage promoting Common Core math in the United States? Why would we follow suit? Again the lecture is promoted on the pretense that "understanding trumps memorization". When would these overpaid consultants and school administrators get that memory work is not bad thing and that it forms the basis of cognitive function and understanding? Why are they still pushing discovery math in the province where we parents, professionals and mathematicians have vociferously protested against it? For those who have received the invitation to his talk, be warned: the Calgary School Board has embellished his credentials to give their ideology credibility. According to one local respected actual mathematician, "James Tanton is not a mathematician. Even after doing a Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton (which should have opened up many opportunities) he evidently couldn't find an academic job. I looked at his resume once and he doesn't come close to the academic standard required even for an assistant professor position in a university math department. I recall that he had only about one academic publication. Tanton instead seems to have chosen a career in arithmetic, lecturing to teachers and parents on the short-cuts and tricks that all of use from time to time but would never dream of formalizing into the bewildering array of so-called strategies that they try to pass of as mathematics these days..." The School Superintendents and School Boards need to stop deceiving Minister Eggen (unless of course, Minister Eggen knowingly condoned something that he knows is causing harm to our children). The president of the Alberta School Board also needs to be held accountable for all the corruption in their organization because they are taking money away from our children's education to promote their self-interests and ideologies. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-school-boards-association-spending-habits-under-fire-1.3311371 Please write to Minister Eggen, Premier Notley, and your MLAs to tell them to stop messing around with our children's education. Tell them what's happening to our children's education. https://www.assembly.ab.ca/net/index.aspx?p=mla_home or just send this prewritten letter just to light some fires under them: http://www.albertansforeducation.com/contact-your-mla/ Please also speak up at the parent-teacher interviews to tell them what you don't want Inspiring Ed philosophy and the push for inquiry/discovery learning. This well articulated article from BC describes exactly the goals of un-Inspiring Education: http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/british-columbia/eagle-mountain-innovation-1.3292303 This in my mind is not acceptable. Warmest regards, Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies https://www.facebook.com/Alberta-Math-Petition-715037091853017/ p.s. A teacher, whom I have the greatest respect for because of how much overtime she puts in for her students and how reluctant she is to take sick leave for fear of failing her students, came into my office the other day and asked if I'm still working on getting the education system straighten out. She went on to tell me about taking a teaching position recently at the Bessie Nichols school -- a school dedicated to implementing the principles of Inspiring Education -- and how she had to get out of there after a year. It was awful, she said. There were no structure or direction for the students because it was all "student-centred". Little did the students (or parents) know that the students weren't learning much of anything in the curriculum because there was just so little focus on actual learning of knowledge. She felt so badly for all the students in the school, but she had to leave. She could not and would not buy into their philosophy. Years of experience and knowledge of how students learn and succeed made it difficult for her to be a part of such a detrimental experiment on the children. Another point she made was that she had marked some math proficiency tests for the students in the area, and she said the Cogito students are so far ahead of schools like the Bessie Nichols that it's not even funny. At least half the kids from these non-Cogito schools did poorly on the testing. Considering that the children (of friends) I know who go to Cogito schools are not any smarter than our own children or any average child, this teacher's observation goes to show you how successful students can be through having teachers direct the learning. Nothing can replace the knowledge and expertise of teachers, unless we let Inspiring Education have its way and demote all our teachers to "facilitators". The scary thing is that some younger teachers, not knowing any better, will think that being "facilitators" is enough to fulfill their roles as teacher. After hearing this teacher's account of more Inspiring Education garbage, it is more important than ever for us to fight this Inspiring Education to the very end. The educational gurus/gov't do not have the right to deprive our children of the opportunity to meet their fullest potential.