Marie, In your posting you said, "All I wanted to do was to find out what my third grader was supposed to belearning. I have seen very little homework come home during the 2nd and 3rd grades and what does come home makes absolutely no sense to me. I have taught plenty of math in my science courses at the college level including a quantum mechanics course so this caught me by surprise."
If you understand and have taught quantum mechanics then you are probably more than aware that most of the population does not arrive at your classroom able to comprehend your course. Since the "TERC" program is relatively new, those children aren't in college yet, so the trouble with the "not TERC" population's understanding of math concepts above the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division must be due to other reasons. I wonder what could be the cause of this lack of mathematical reasoning in the upper grades? Could there be more to math than just basic facts?
If you would like to learn more, I would suggest you read the book Adding it Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics by the National Research Council (2001) ISBN 0-309-06995-5
