I mentioned in my last newsletter a Gates Foundation survey of teachers and parents. It’s since received a bunch of coverage, especially of two findings: Parents think math is the subject in school most in need of an upgrade. US adults think math class needs to become more useful and relevant to students.
I love this! We know students are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge that only a teacher can deliver, yet so many of us treat students as such. Listen to students. Respect their experience and knowledge. Let that inform the trajectory of our classes.
Thanks for this great take on math education. I've moved to using Peg Smith's "Five Practices" more over the past years (orchestrating math discussions with student input) and things have gotten SO much better with engagement.
To me, the overall layout of standards and is possibly the biggest obstacle for keeping kids interested in math. Using literacy we an analogy, we teach the basic steps of math the way we teach basic spelling. But then we don't introduce the most important basic form of story telling (algebra) until middle school! By this point this major sector of actual math is a foreign language. Often students haven't had any real introduction to other areas either (eg. geometry & stats). Some of the kids think they're good at it but all they're good at is spelling bee level skills.
I've been working in mathematics education since 1990. That's long enough to have noticed that very little changes about what we say regarding math ed: there are critics who want to return things to math class c. 1950 and don't want any changes from that culture. There are critics who see many problems with that same approach and have been trying to get various changes implemented as widely as possible. There are teachers who work at some point on the spectrum between traditionalism and innovation, sometimes regardless of where they'd like to be, at least in principle. And there are parents who either see the wisdom of "upgrading" math education or believe that such changes are harbingers of the collapse of American life as we know it.
As my career comes to a close (though I'm still teaching full-time), I must say that it's inspiring to know that there are people like you who are dedicated innovators with eyes on the truly important issues, most notably that for the most part, students are irrelevant to math class. And it's frustrating beyond belief that so little has changed. Not that there aren't some fabulous new ideas and some teachers creating and/or implementing them, and communicating with other teachers to help grow the community, but that there are still so many math teachers in K-12 who in my honest opinion have no business being given the assignment of educating students in mathematics. They range from those who truly don't know the mathematics they're expected to teach to those who may know how to calculate and solve problems quite effectively but are disconnected and alienated from their students. I don't think I'm indulging in hyperbole to say that such people are committing crimes in their classrooms. But as a nation, we seem unable to do much about it, even if a handful of politicians out there somewhere might recognize the actual problem (and I'm not so sure that even a handful exist).
Gates and other billionaires and Wall Street hustlers can do all the surveys, host all the conferences, fund all the magic curricular materials and technology they want: it should be glaringly evident if we look honestly at the history of mathematics education in this country over the past 150 years or so that we're failing on the whole to serve the students adequately, let alone well. And in my opinion, we should be ashamed, because many of the solutions already exist, in theory. But we undermine nearly every attempt to implement them intelligently and consistently. How many more decades will pass before that changes for the better? Will educators like Dan Meyer be writing similar screeds to mine in thirty or forty years? I hope not. But I fear that it will be so.
Thank you Dan, in my years in business and education (physics teacher), I have realised that some of the issue is the elitism around maths ability. This needs to change Maths is everywhere and in everything as separate subject we take the relevance from it. Attempts at real world problems often fall very short of real as they are contrived by a maths teacher. Return maths to art, architecture, and philosphy. Maths is a tool used to explain relationships and create the ability to predict outcomes not possible in simply measuring. The simple concept of "if this then what?" is a great place to start, it is about thinking not doing.
Apologies to great mathematicians who base their self worth on being good at something most find irrelevant and difficult. Apologies to the literacy community about my writing skills and feel their value lies there. Sue
I'm not hearing reflective enough questions here, such as...
- What makes SOME experienced math teachers last in the classroom while SO MANY leave the classroom forever?
- Who is succeeding long-term in the classroom and why?
- What are we doing in math teacher preparation that is not working?
- Why are our proposed reforms not taking hold in the wider world?
- What feedback have we solicited from experienced and successful teachers?
- What structural changes are we proposing to the teaching profession that would make it a longer-lasting and more sustainable career throughout North America?
I, too, saw the article and thought...hmmm....it's not necessarily that math isn't real-world relevant (at least not in my class)...it's that the real world students are currently experiencing is missing math -- they no longer have to read an analog clock, count money, make change or balance a checking account....forget measuring anything or even remembering a phone number...asking students to analyze or think critically or persevere in problem solving seems too much for too many. Just today I was advising a mom on the best way to help her children with math over the summer -- involve them in doubling recipes that involve fractions, share the family budget, make vacation planning a group effort, have them help out with car mechanics that involve standard & metric tools...in general show children how math is an important part of everyday life....these things are necessary for students to believe they need math, that in itself will serve to make math more engaging & appealng.
I notice that the survey did not provide any data on HOW to assess what students are learning in K-12 education. I know that would be much harder because the "basics" are much easier to assess on standardized testing. We still have a huge disconnect there.☺
Regardless, I too have been working in Math Ed since 1990 and have 5 more years in my future. I still struggle with getting kids to notice, wonder, and come up with ideas on how to approach problems—especially in Algebra 2! I have resorted to the 'headache' scenario that Dan Meyer has utilized—the idea that there is a lengthy messy way to solve things and then, with the assistance of "math basics", we can streamline the process.
Today in our College Algebra class, after a week of struggling of solving systems of 3 equations 3 variables, I introduced the topic of Matrices. They bought into it when they we used Augmented Matrices to solve a problem they all struggled with on the homework assignment. Granted, we are using a matrix calculator to get rref, but next week we get to try to create the rref using row addition.
I know the kids don't exactly know what they will be when they "grow up". But giving them a rich experience in math class creates pathways into so many other areas of life that it is worth the time and effort to be creative in our approaches to teaching what is often a "hated" subject.
Couldn't agree more with you on all of this. Kids need to be heard and involved. They need real and fake-world problems that are fun, creative, engaging, and require their input. KenKen puzzles are a perfect example of this. They do not relate to the real world at all, yet they are very fun, challenging, and can bring out many different ways of thinking from students.
Asking students to guess about the topic rather than teaching the topic isn’t great practice. There are ways to engage students that don’t involve holding up a mirror. Success at mathematics, taught well, means that students don’t need to be entertained and the teacher doesn’t need to make maths ‘relatable’ all the time.
An unsolicited observation from an old man about a time when it was obvious math liked me. In the fifty's from the fifth grade on I used the arithmetic I learned. I added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided when I fed calves, made change for cash register, did inventory in after-school jobs, kept track of cement mixers for the state highway commission, kept the running ledgers for milk delivery customers.... I watched my father do pencil and paper calculation to effect.
I would have been well served my state's math standards for k-8 arithmetic that I see on the web today. I started college with a slide rule and ended graduate school relying on Fortran. Today my smart phone does arithmetic at my beckoning. If I were a parent today, would I see relevance in school arithmetic?
When I look at the technology available today and feel envy. But I also feel anger at at the lost opportunities they experience because their education does not like them
“Kids aren't disinterested in math class; it's that math class is disinterested in them," succinctly encapsulates a fundamental issue in math education today. It highlights the importance of shifting the paradigm from passive instruction to active engagement.
We as math educators to bridge the gap between the subject matter and the students by demonstrating a sincere interest in their learning journey, and being the math to them. By doing so, we can create math classrooms where students not only excel academically but also develop a lasting appreciation for the beauty and relevance of mathematics in their lives.
AI gives us an opening to make digital learning materials more open to democratic decomposition and inquiry (Desmos sliders for everything!) but only if interest in actual student thinking is part of the design, not just “do you think like this yet?”
I’m curious if American students are more in need of a personal dialogue with mathematical thinking than students from other countries.
I love this! We know students are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge that only a teacher can deliver, yet so many of us treat students as such. Listen to students. Respect their experience and knowledge. Let that inform the trajectory of our classes.
Thanks for this great take on math education. I've moved to using Peg Smith's "Five Practices" more over the past years (orchestrating math discussions with student input) and things have gotten SO much better with engagement.
To me, the overall layout of standards and is possibly the biggest obstacle for keeping kids interested in math. Using literacy we an analogy, we teach the basic steps of math the way we teach basic spelling. But then we don't introduce the most important basic form of story telling (algebra) until middle school! By this point this major sector of actual math is a foreign language. Often students haven't had any real introduction to other areas either (eg. geometry & stats). Some of the kids think they're good at it but all they're good at is spelling bee level skills.
I've been working in mathematics education since 1990. That's long enough to have noticed that very little changes about what we say regarding math ed: there are critics who want to return things to math class c. 1950 and don't want any changes from that culture. There are critics who see many problems with that same approach and have been trying to get various changes implemented as widely as possible. There are teachers who work at some point on the spectrum between traditionalism and innovation, sometimes regardless of where they'd like to be, at least in principle. And there are parents who either see the wisdom of "upgrading" math education or believe that such changes are harbingers of the collapse of American life as we know it.
As my career comes to a close (though I'm still teaching full-time), I must say that it's inspiring to know that there are people like you who are dedicated innovators with eyes on the truly important issues, most notably that for the most part, students are irrelevant to math class. And it's frustrating beyond belief that so little has changed. Not that there aren't some fabulous new ideas and some teachers creating and/or implementing them, and communicating with other teachers to help grow the community, but that there are still so many math teachers in K-12 who in my honest opinion have no business being given the assignment of educating students in mathematics. They range from those who truly don't know the mathematics they're expected to teach to those who may know how to calculate and solve problems quite effectively but are disconnected and alienated from their students. I don't think I'm indulging in hyperbole to say that such people are committing crimes in their classrooms. But as a nation, we seem unable to do much about it, even if a handful of politicians out there somewhere might recognize the actual problem (and I'm not so sure that even a handful exist).
Gates and other billionaires and Wall Street hustlers can do all the surveys, host all the conferences, fund all the magic curricular materials and technology they want: it should be glaringly evident if we look honestly at the history of mathematics education in this country over the past 150 years or so that we're failing on the whole to serve the students adequately, let alone well. And in my opinion, we should be ashamed, because many of the solutions already exist, in theory. But we undermine nearly every attempt to implement them intelligently and consistently. How many more decades will pass before that changes for the better? Will educators like Dan Meyer be writing similar screeds to mine in thirty or forty years? I hope not. But I fear that it will be so.
Thank you Dan, in my years in business and education (physics teacher), I have realised that some of the issue is the elitism around maths ability. This needs to change Maths is everywhere and in everything as separate subject we take the relevance from it. Attempts at real world problems often fall very short of real as they are contrived by a maths teacher. Return maths to art, architecture, and philosphy. Maths is a tool used to explain relationships and create the ability to predict outcomes not possible in simply measuring. The simple concept of "if this then what?" is a great place to start, it is about thinking not doing.
Apologies to great mathematicians who base their self worth on being good at something most find irrelevant and difficult. Apologies to the literacy community about my writing skills and feel their value lies there. Sue
I'm not hearing reflective enough questions here, such as...
- What makes SOME experienced math teachers last in the classroom while SO MANY leave the classroom forever?
- Who is succeeding long-term in the classroom and why?
- What are we doing in math teacher preparation that is not working?
- Why are our proposed reforms not taking hold in the wider world?
- What feedback have we solicited from experienced and successful teachers?
- What structural changes are we proposing to the teaching profession that would make it a longer-lasting and more sustainable career throughout North America?
I, too, saw the article and thought...hmmm....it's not necessarily that math isn't real-world relevant (at least not in my class)...it's that the real world students are currently experiencing is missing math -- they no longer have to read an analog clock, count money, make change or balance a checking account....forget measuring anything or even remembering a phone number...asking students to analyze or think critically or persevere in problem solving seems too much for too many. Just today I was advising a mom on the best way to help her children with math over the summer -- involve them in doubling recipes that involve fractions, share the family budget, make vacation planning a group effort, have them help out with car mechanics that involve standard & metric tools...in general show children how math is an important part of everyday life....these things are necessary for students to believe they need math, that in itself will serve to make math more engaging & appealng.
I notice that the survey did not provide any data on HOW to assess what students are learning in K-12 education. I know that would be much harder because the "basics" are much easier to assess on standardized testing. We still have a huge disconnect there.☺
Regardless, I too have been working in Math Ed since 1990 and have 5 more years in my future. I still struggle with getting kids to notice, wonder, and come up with ideas on how to approach problems—especially in Algebra 2! I have resorted to the 'headache' scenario that Dan Meyer has utilized—the idea that there is a lengthy messy way to solve things and then, with the assistance of "math basics", we can streamline the process.
Today in our College Algebra class, after a week of struggling of solving systems of 3 equations 3 variables, I introduced the topic of Matrices. They bought into it when they we used Augmented Matrices to solve a problem they all struggled with on the homework assignment. Granted, we are using a matrix calculator to get rref, but next week we get to try to create the rref using row addition.
I know the kids don't exactly know what they will be when they "grow up". But giving them a rich experience in math class creates pathways into so many other areas of life that it is worth the time and effort to be creative in our approaches to teaching what is often a "hated" subject.
Couldn't agree more with you on all of this. Kids need to be heard and involved. They need real and fake-world problems that are fun, creative, engaging, and require their input. KenKen puzzles are a perfect example of this. They do not relate to the real world at all, yet they are very fun, challenging, and can bring out many different ways of thinking from students.
Asking students to guess about the topic rather than teaching the topic isn’t great practice. There are ways to engage students that don’t involve holding up a mirror. Success at mathematics, taught well, means that students don’t need to be entertained and the teacher doesn’t need to make maths ‘relatable’ all the time.
An unsolicited observation from an old man about a time when it was obvious math liked me. In the fifty's from the fifth grade on I used the arithmetic I learned. I added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided when I fed calves, made change for cash register, did inventory in after-school jobs, kept track of cement mixers for the state highway commission, kept the running ledgers for milk delivery customers.... I watched my father do pencil and paper calculation to effect.
I would have been well served my state's math standards for k-8 arithmetic that I see on the web today. I started college with a slide rule and ended graduate school relying on Fortran. Today my smart phone does arithmetic at my beckoning. If I were a parent today, would I see relevance in school arithmetic?
When I look at the technology available today and feel envy. But I also feel anger at at the lost opportunities they experience because their education does not like them
Wow. That quote just hit me like a ton of bricks.
“Kids aren't disinterested in math class; it's that math class is disinterested in them," succinctly encapsulates a fundamental issue in math education today. It highlights the importance of shifting the paradigm from passive instruction to active engagement.
We as math educators to bridge the gap between the subject matter and the students by demonstrating a sincere interest in their learning journey, and being the math to them. By doing so, we can create math classrooms where students not only excel academically but also develop a lasting appreciation for the beauty and relevance of mathematics in their lives.
Loved this one Dan.
AI gives us an opening to make digital learning materials more open to democratic decomposition and inquiry (Desmos sliders for everything!) but only if interest in actual student thinking is part of the design, not just “do you think like this yet?”
I’m curious if American students are more in need of a personal dialogue with mathematical thinking than students from other countries.