Bringing Math to Life
Thornton Creek 1st Grade Classroom | 05/16/2008 | 10:00 am – Noon | Present: Mari Brockhaus, Mary, Parent Volunteer, Academic Assistant, 24 students, myself
The Seattle public school district released a new Math curriculum this year for Elementary age students. The curriculum has been received with mixed reactions. Unlike previous, and more traditional Math curricula, this one does not cover major math concepts in a sequential order. Instead, it touches on a concept and then another seemingly separate one, all in a single lesson. Then it lets both concepts go, moving on to yet another set of concepts, periodically referencing or bringing back a concept that was covered earlier. It does a “touch and go” on concepts, never pausing to dig into one fully.
I had the opportunity to observe students take an assessment at what seemed like a unit mostly focused on the place value of numbers. Mari spent a significant amount of time debriefing with me after the observation to help me get a full understanding of the curriculum. As she did this, I was able to gain an insight into the likely motivation behind this new curriculum. Looking through the workbook more closely made things even clearer.
This new curriculum is meant to make Math more real in that it covers more real life examples and applications of Math. It does more than just that though, in touching on concepts, not in their entirety but fleetingly and then returning to them it mimics situations in which one would encounter a Math concept in life. You might need to use lucky patcher no root access found percents to determine the discounted price at a sale and then move on to probability as you play a game of cards only to return to percents when you determine the sales tax on a purchase and so on. The curriculum is teasing student brains with Math concepts so that the focus is on being able to think Mathematically rather than learning specific concepts. I appreciate that. The ability of knowing “how to learn” is more universally applicable and relevant than “what to learn”.
I do however see a significant disadvantage of this and most any subject curriculum that tries to mimic life. Mimicking life, can be only that. That is, it is mimicking. It is not life. When children encounter Math or for that matter any other subject in life, it is not a subject, it is life, it is real and it is whole in what it is. It is also very relevant and significant. For example, when a child wants to decide how many kites she can afford to buy, her problem is real and so her learning will also be real. She has to deal with all the concepts involved in solving the problem without knowing them as concepts. This is very different from a problem in a Math book that tries to solve the same problem. For one the problem is not as pertinent or significant which changes how involved the child feels in solving the problem. For another, it is not whole to the specific child — what makes a problem whole is the child herself. Any intricacies that might exist, for example, the availability of only quarters taken from the piggybank to pay for the kites are also missing and if introduced into the workbook problem will be confusing and contrived.
The question that this begs is whether we can just let children learn Math from life, from daily living that is? Or can we not? It may seem so unreliable to let them just get what they get from life. But, what else do they have if not life itself? Doing anything outside of it seems so forced. I recognize this is a bigger question than I intend to cover in this reflection so I will leave it for now. Let it be out there as something I need to think about.
It is however my conclusion that when we do not offer our children the opportunities to just learn from living, it might sometimes be meaningful to create curricula that mimic life. That is better than a complete out-of-context curriculum. Mari’s experience with her students corroborates this. Her students really do seem to be getting Math out of what might seem like a very erratic “touch and go” curriculum.