Ways to Improve Math Learning
As a Teacher, most time we do get frustrated when a student failed to understand a particular topic, especially in Mathematics. But if we can remember, many of we teachers too hated math when we were kids. It wasn’t math’s fault or neither ours . It could simply be traced to the way we were taught. Memorizing rules—”Whatever you do to the top of the fraction, you do to the bottom”—that got scrambled in our brains by the next day’s lesson. Elementary-school teacher, Justin Minkel shared some of the challenges he faced in teaching math which could relate to some of us too. He said:
”When it comes to national attitudes about math, I am a prime example of what’s wrong with America. The last math class I took was in 10th grade (something about triangles, I think). The closest I veered toward math in college was a “Physics for Poets” class for non-majors about mind-blowing concepts involving relativity and chaos theory. (I liked everything about it except the math).
When I started teaching 4th grade, I had no idea what to do if the kids didn’t already understand the math concept I was teaching. I once froze up in the middle of a measurement lesson, with no idea how to go on. My mentor teacher (bless her) had to step in and finish the lesson. He continued,
”I was never a good math student, but I have become a damn good math teacher. It wasn’t easy to get here, and I still find myself backsliding. Going whole weeks where the only thing kids touch in math class is a pencil.
Haven narrated some of the problems often faced in math class; he then highlighted some of the few principles that make math vibrant, creative, meaningful, and fun in class.
1. Have kids build things.
Students can create the multiplication table rather than memorizing it, by figuring out which arrays could make products like 12 (2×6, 3×4, 1×12). They can see that a square number (4, 9, 16) is an actual square. They can get that 3×4 and 4×3 both have 12 squares, but you rotate the array when you flip the factors.
Have them fold paper to make their own fraction strips, so they get that there are two halves in a whole, or four fourths, and that the more times you cut up a piece of paper, the smaller each piece will get—which explains the dissonance they feel when 1/12 is so much smaller than 1/3, even though 12 is a bigger number than 3. They can apply measurement and geometry to engineering simulations, through design challenges to make a parachute for a gummy bear or to build the tallest, most stable, and most symmetrical tower they can with tape and straws. Math should involve creativity, teamwork, trial and error, and absurd amounts of Scotch tape. It almost never does.
2. Play games, but include the notation
The biggest difference between games that further understanding and games that don’t has less to do with the materials, or even the game itself, than the kind of mathematical notation the kids are doing.
Students have to get comfortable with the idea that numbers are flexible, not fixed quantities. They have to decompose, or break apart, numbers to make them easier to work with.
Take for example, you can have the kids rotate around the room in teams of three to various whiteboards that each have a number written at the top: 5, 10, 15,20,25, and so on. In their team, the kids decompose the number as many ways as they can before it’s time to rotate to the next station.
Furthermore, each board is a rich trove of mathematical concepts and properties. For example, the kids who decomposed “15” wrote equations that served as three different teaching points during our discussion afterwards
We tend to teach the way we were taught, the same way moms and dads often re-create our own childhoods when it comes to the way we raise our children. It’s OK if you weren’t good at math when you were in school. It’s OK if you have usually taught with worksheets, textbooks, and memorized rules. But we can break that bad pattern.
Let’s try to fill our students’ hours of math with as much color, construction, meaning, deep thinking, and sensory experiences as possible. They will need math their whole lives, even if they never experience the go-to examples of balancing a checkbook or making sure they don’t get cheated on the change they get back at a store.
We all use logical reasoning, spatial thinking, and concepts of number, whether we’re rearranging the furniture in our living room, grocery shopping for a dinner party.
In conclusion, our students need to see, feel, and understand math at a physical and intuitive level. Let’s try to give them that gift that so many of us were denied.
By: Justin Minkel