I recently received this email out of the blue from a math teacher in California. I think that it’s really important that others read what he comes up against trying to give teach math to his fourth-grade students so I asked the sender if I could put it – anonymized – in a short blog. The sender agreed.

Dear Dr. Kirschner,

This is XXXXX, fourth-grade teacher in XXXXXXXXX, California.

I read HLH and HTH and listened to the recent Chalk and Talk podcast interview. Armed with my new knowledge, I’ve started to look at things critically and ask questions.

I’m not the only teacher enlightened by your work and likely not the first one to begin to look at education differently as a result, so I’m sorry to report that it’s not going well.

Basically, my district-adopted math curriculum (iReady k-5 classroom mathematics) doesn’t appear to have many aspects from…