Community reviews for Illustrative Mathematics

Lessons are disjointed and many activities are difficult for students to understand. The activities are often wastes of time, leaving students with vague ideas of what it was that they were supposed to be learning. There is a severe lack of graphic organizers, little to no attention paid to developing calculator skills, and extraneous activities included in the middle of lessons that do little to nothing to develop relevant skills. The biggest problem of all is the assumed level of existing foundational skills. Nothing is done to review previously-studied topics. The assumptions at the beginning of many lessons are "since students studied this in 8th grade, they will know exactly how this works." This curriculum has ended up adding a significant amount of work on my end to make the lessons semi-presentable for students. Many lessons require 1-2 days of pre/re-teaching to get my students ready to consume the information presented in the lessons (days that we do not have to spare). Even after these 1-2 days, the lessons are difficult for students to understand and gain any sort of working knowledge from. There is also very little opportunity for students to practice skills. There is no focus on mastering individual skills. Rather, it is all about exposing students to a broad array of ideas each day and moving on to another broad view the next day. As a result, students are not aptly prepared to reproduce the diagrams or analyze problems independently when assessed.

IM relies HEAVILY on existing conceptual knowledge, needs visual learners, and assumes STRONG underlying fundamentals. Many of our students JUST DO NOT GET IT. Worse yet, their test scores reflect this! Students often express frustration with these materials, all of which are a vast change from the traditional and successful curriculum that they are used to. Honestly, IM is simply painful and awkward to use. Even basics like "area, volume, perimeter, or surface area" must be reviewed many times and reinforced with a lot of Non-Curriculum materials to actually Engage Students. There is VERY LITTLE practice provided, as if middle schoolers will somehow master a subject with a mere 4-6 examples. In short, YOU must do a TON of Heavy Lifting in the classroom, with many other resources to overcome the Many Shortfalls of the book and slides. Lack of Practice SEVERE lack of practice for each skill. Lessons generally have 2-3 "activities" to introduce concepts with only 4-5 problems per lesson. Mediocre or Poor Assessments Many questions are badly designed and students often do not understand them. Sometimes, problems are not aligned with lessons at all Hands On Activities are generally poor and overly time-consuming Lack of Depth As with many other options, you cover a lot of topics but do not get very deep into any of them really. The pacing is far too fast for weaker learners, especially post-Covid. The typical 1 lesson per day will absolutely leave many students in the dust.

SCORES WENT UP but even more importantly: confidence, conversation, metacognition, COMMUNITY improved across the board. When an educator commits to understanding this curriculum and how to apply it, students SOAR. My biggest hint is that metacognitive mathematics discussion requires students to be WILLING to talk about their thinking. Once they get over that hurdle they understand EVERYTHING more personally so I had to learn to grade them for giving me what I wanted: engagement. My MS students get 100 for a class grade when they are THINKING, TRYING an COLLABORATING.

I do no recommend IM as a main curriculum. This curriculum does not reach all learning styles. Many of my students that are not visual or manipulative learns quit before they even get the opportunity to try. We used it in or district for three years our test scores went down and when we vertically planned with high school teachers they talked about large learning gaps and not doing well with high school standards.