Not a Math Moron After All

[judifilksign]

 Attended a teacher training today about bridging gaps between how elementary school math is taught, and how middle and high school math is taught.  Very enlightening.

Many high school teachers are cross because they do not think that students have "the basics" any more.  In fact, they do.  But the methods of teaching math in the past ten years have shifted at the elementary level, but the ways that high school math teachers are building are still using the old-school methods, which the upcoming freshmen have never seen before.

Lattice multiplication, partial sums, partial quotients and partial dividend methods, in which you solve problems with place value firmly in mind, and not just setting up math problems by rote, and chunking through a process without understanding it are things the high school teachers haven't seen, so they have to spend time teaching the rote methods, and cannot build on a child's understanding of the distributive property.

We were given worksheets in which we had to show as many different ways to solve a problem as we could think of.  Addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, and finding the area of a trapezoid.

I had scribbles everywhere.  I showed a lot of my thinking in weird ways, but came up with the correct answers.  At least once, I started a process and crossed it out because it wasn't working.  They pounced on that, and asked why I had abandoned that effort, and when I said that it didn't match my estimate, they broke down why, and how I could have "saved" that calculation using the method I'd started.

I had pictograms.  I had groupings.  I had triangles making squares added to rectangles to simplify formulas.  I had a mess!  Dividing 689 by 5 using squares for one hundreds, circles for tens, and hatch marks for ones amused people.  But it showed the concept clearly, and we discussed how I would use it with the math manipulables for my special education students.

We were given student work of the same examples, and another strength I had was figuring out how the students had solved the problems, and being able to reconstruct what it was that they were thinking as they did the problem.  A couple of the other teachers had a hard time with this, and my talk-out-louds to myself in what was going on proved to be helpful for others who could determine right or wrong answers, but not how the student got there.

I had, I was told, a strong numbers sense - the very thing they tried to develop in the students, but so often could not.  I spent a LOT of time asking question after question after question, and none of the math teachers were bothered that I took up so much of their time.  I evidently provided insight as to the thinking processes of their students in ways that hadn't been accessible, because I had the shared adult vocabulary to ask the questions that kids would just say "I don't know" to.  One told me that I made a workshop that she was enduring for the credit points into an interesting one for her.

I found it funny that part of the training for the other teachers was "What questions can you ask Judi to enhance her understanding of this concept?"  And many times, the answer back was "I want to see what she's doing.  I'm getting this better by watching her do it."

I think that if I had been taught in this way when I was in elementary school, I'd've done much better, even though I have dyscalculia (like dyslexia, but reversing numbers instead of letters.)

Comments

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

The instructors validated all of the mental math problems and counting back change things my mother had me do as a child. Those activities probably built most of my ability to estimate and have a numbers sense.

So, thirty years later, I appreciate it.