Eureka Math part 1

This year our district made the decision to implement Eureka Math, aka Great Minds, aka Engage New York. Whew! I feel like I'm in the Lord of the Rings here! To keep it simple, I'll just refer to it as Eureka.
The curriculum was originally created for schools in New York State and is available free on engageny.org. Eureka provides the material in printed form and according to their sales people, it's nothing at all like Engage New York (except that they are mostly identical). I don't know exactly what that means, but if you look at the material on the ENY website, there are small differences between the two.
 We chose the Eureka materials because it was the only (at the time) k-12 program that had been written for the Common Core State Standards from the ground up. Every other publisher had modified their existing curriculum with "inserts" and "supplements." We all know where those end up when you give them to teachers (most of the time, at any rate).
Now I'm very aware that Eureka is controversial. In fact, I read a lot of the negative blog posts that are out there in an attempt to try to find where the pitfalls and problems might be lurking. After using it for a year, I have come to agree with some of the criticisms. However, the program is not all bad. There is a lot of good material there and I have been working on how to open up some of the problems and incorporate activities such as Desmos and many of the great ones over at MTBoS. That said, here are some of the criticisms I do agree with.
First of all, there is no way you are going to get through the whole curriculum in the time they allot. They say things like intro: 5 minutes and example 1: 7 minutes and when you add them up they are supposed to use one class period.  Only everything takes twice as long (or more) than they say. I suppose if you had a classroom of students who had spent their entire school careers doing Eureka, maybe they could do it??? Maybe??? Maybe not... Meanwhile, I have a file cabinet full of exit tickets that we have never even gotten to. Maybe next year I'll figure out how to fit them in.
However, I don't see this as just a problem with Eureka. I've been saying since the first time I looked at the CCSSM that they didn't fix the "mile wide" problem with high school standards. The sample textbooks I've received from different publishers actually contain more sections and more material per section than the already bloated textbooks I was using pre CCSSM. The last program I had contained enough "supplemental material" that you could have spent the full year just teaching chapter one and never run out of publisher supplied worksheets.
And back to Eureka, this is not even including the assessments. I know that a lot of teachers think the assessments were written by the devil in the bowels of hell, but I don't think they are all that bad. Still, they are tough, and they are way too long! They are intended to really make students think, not just see if they have memorized procedures, but my students need 2 or even 3 class periods to finish them. I feel for teachers who are in districts where they have been told "You are giving the module 1 assessment on this day!" I am lucky to find myself in a district where I have some freedom with the program. I have been giving the assessments over a multi day period and I still usually cut out one or two problems. For next year, I think I will probably break them down and use the smaller pieces more often.  Maybe this violates some important piece of pedagogy, but at the rate I am getting students through the modules, we haven't even been able to get to some of the assessments. Besides, I feel like smaller assessments more often are more informative to the students (not to mention, less stressful).
Then there's the script thing. I never took the suggested dialogue as anything more than a suggestion, but there are folks who believe (maybe they've been told by administrators?) that they must teach the curriculum word for word. The script is there so that a teacher who isn't familiar with Eureka can begin to interpret the curriculum and understand the nuances of the concept that are so important. There are a lot of suggestions for discussion because the program is trying to build conceptual understanding and a lot of teachers have always been taught, and are teaching at, the procedural level. I can see that this would be a big challenge for someone at the elementary level who may have their own lack of the conceptual understanding behind the procedures they are used to teaching.
I also think there is a lot of misinterpretation of what the program is trying to accomplish at any level. I know I was pretty confused until I began to see the connections between what students are learning in Algebra and how those concepts carry all the way through pre-calculus. My first impression when looking through the Eureka curriculum was "huh?" It didn't make sense to me where they had come up with some of the material or where they seemed headed with it. After using it for a year, I have a better understanding of how the program is put together and sequenced to follow and support the CCSSM. The Engage New York website has a lot of supporting materials, so maybe there is something I haven't found yet that does a good job of explaining how the different threads and strands are woven together to create a coherent program that should take a student from kindergarten through 12th grade. (I'm thinking of something like Graham Fletchers progressions videos here--just haven't found anything like this yet.)
I know that there are people who really hate this curriculum and those that really like it. I remember one discussion I had with teachers on a Facebook group about instructions in a second or third grade lesson (I don't remember which.) The instructions stated that what students were doing was laying the foundation for when they would be taught the standard algorithm for multiplication. It didn't state that teachers would or should be teaching that algorithm at that level at all, but some teachers had interpreted it as exactly that. They were arguing that students weren't ready for the standard algorithm at that level and therefore the program was awful and should be scrapped. (I've heard this argument about the CCSSM as well.)
I don't know much about how the elementary teachers in our district feel about it, but even knowing the drawbacks, I feel like it is at least a good starting point. It is something I can work with and I'm keeping an open mind.  This summer, I'm playing around with the Desmos activities to see what I can work in. I've also been attending Jo Boaler's mindset trainings at Stanford and using the Youcubed resources.  I'm working pretty hard to figure out how to "mesh" the two together so that the mindset thinking will permeate the Eureka curriculum. I'll also be going for actual training from Great Minds this summer. I'm looking forward to gaining more insight into the program for next year. Meantime, next post will be about some of the things I have learned from teaching the program this year.