We were sitting around at our staff meeting today, looking at the MEA scores for our school and wondering how we could help improve our students' performance in math. The discussion turned to how students don't just "do" math nowadays.
First of all, if I had a dime for every time I'd heard "students today just don't _____", I'd be a rich man. That only beats "families today just don't______" by a very slim margin. Fact is, we're teachers, and we play the cards we're dealt. Meet the kids where they are, and help them get farther on. But I digress.
I tried to think of a time in my life, especially my adolescence, when I just "did" math. I can remember getting up an hour before I normally would have (5:30?), to try to get my long division problems done. Mom was up with me, enduring the tears and the woe, and we somehow worked through it. Thanks mom, you unwittingly helped make the case for "families today" arguments. At any rate, that was somewhere around 4th grade. I wasn't into baseball in a sick, obsessed sort of way...yet.
Flash forward about two years. I'm a sixth grader, who lives and dies by the Red Sox. And magically, I had developed the ability to manipulate fractions and percentages to the extent that, by the end of his at bat, I could calculate what Dwight Evans' batting average would be at the end of the at bat, whether he got a hit or didn't.
Then, in eighth grade, I was into calculating shooting percentages and free throw percentages on our school basketball team. My FT% was easy, because when you don't make any free throws, 0% is really easy to calculate.
So somewhere along the line, someone confused my statistical sickness with the ability (or desire, or readiness) to do higher order math in eighth grade. Eighth grade algebra was a dismal failure. The teacher was good, he was entertaining, and he really tried to help me. I just wasn't ready, and I didn't care. Taking the class again in my freshman year wasn't much more successful, but I did manage to pass.
I don't really know what the point of all this is. Regular, everyday calculations have been easy since I used them on an everyday basis for things I enjoyed, so maybe we're onto something there. But the more abstract concepts have never come easy, even to this day. Physics took a serious toll on my self-esteem when I took it last summer, and statistics was the bane of my existence in my earlier grad school stint. But geometry and trig were fine during high school.
I think I've figured out what the point of all this is: the point is, "meet the kids where they are, and help them get farther on." Sometimes digression can lead you to an clarity.
3 comments:
So you never sat around the table figuring out Punnet Squares or the fractional breakdown of your heritage?
(Um, I think I just raised my Geek Flag for all to see...)
I used to teach math--one year at middle school and six years at a community college and my students always balked at word problems. I never really understood that since word problems is the way they use math day to day without realizing it. Somehow we need a curriculum that is all reality math--all word problems but without the intimidation and the trains speeding toward each other at different rates of speed.
I remember doing those Punnet Squares and liking them!
Come to think of it, which is the dominant eye color? Green or blue?
Talk about digressing...
I enjoyed your post Dave!
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