It's sort of the opposite. I see us as a place to put into practice what works. Classes are broken into bite-sized activities, which are posted as an agenda. Academy, a nearby charter school where Mrs. Damiba used to teach. The focus is on reading and math, both taught daily for at least 90 minutes and sometimes as much as three hours.
Students learn singsong gimmicks for how to solve word problems, add fractions and divide decimals.
Following the steps takes precedence over understanding the concepts. Mr. Reid demanded one morning, ordering the children to put down their pencils and watch him write on the board. The decimal point in the quotient goes directly above the decimal in the dividend. If you don't, you'll get it wrong. By May, the children had done so many practice problems that they swore they had seen the ones on the standardized test before.