Mathematics Focus
Sara McManus
School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
EDUC 400: Curricular Enactment in the Early Years with a Focus on Literacy, Numeracy and Fine Arts
Instructors: Dr. David Litz and Melanie Baerg
July 25, 2022
This was a bit of a difficult reflection for me because you don’t know what you don’t know until you do. I hope that I will not lose what has made me an amazing Math teacher to my students at the Alternate school because of the knowledge that I have gained through readings like Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Intervention in the Elementary Grades What Works – Educator’s Practice Guide (2021)and the Math Minds course in EDUC 398 (https://www.structuringinquiry.com/). My students loved how I didn’t use academic language. They appreciated how I could take what other teachers had tried to explain to them for years and turn it into something they could use practically in their lives, in words they understood, in a way that they could relate to. I thought out of the box to find creative solutions as I relearned high school mathematics with them. I still see my students in the community, and they beg for me to come back because the “real” new math teacher doesn’t teach them the same way I did. I wish I could go back, but in life, that never happens. It will likely be a very long time before I teach in that Alternate School again, and hopefully, they will all be graduated by then. Even if I could, I don’t think I could teach the same way anymore. My understanding, knowledge, and vocabulary of mathematics have expanded, and it would be nearly impossible to do so. I am left needing to find my own new mathematics teaching style, and I am yearning deeply to get back into my own classroom with new students who don’t know my previous style so I can start fresh at the elementary level.
Before I leave the subject of my Alternate students, if I ever could go back in time, I wish I could have recognized the reading deficits that my math students had for what they were. I was so blind. Not one of them in two years told me they couldn’t read. Looking back, I am sure I had all different levels of readers, from completely illiterate to proficient. It is so apparent now. Pre-covid, I floated around the classroom, and the ones who struggled with reading would wait for me. I would ask if they had tried it on their own, and there was always an excuse, and then we would always work through the question together, which generally involved me reading it upside down and now that I think about it, I would scribe the answers for some of them too. Duh! Insert -Forehead Slap Emoji!!! So yes… Natalie Wexler hit the nail on the head when she wrote, “if you can’t read a math problem, you can’t solve it. And even if you can read it—or listen to someone else read it—if you don’t have the vocabulary you need to understand it, you’re also out of luck,” in When Language Prevents Kids From Succeeding at Math (2022).
This EDUC 400 course has allowed me some time to contemplate my pedagogical thinking regarding whether I will be a theme-based teacher that does a lot of cross-curricular work with my students versus more of an isolated subject per block kind of teacher in my practice. I suppose I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into one category, but I feel like I am more of a one-subject at a time teacher, especially as the grades increase in the elementary years. My gut feeling is saying that everything I have been learning leads me toward explicit instruction with Universal Design in a classroom with solid routines and a community culture of inclusive learning. A focused scope and sequence will allow me the most opportunity to impact the largest number of students. I suppose that I like to have all my boxes checked, and it would be highly complicated trying to squeeze specific lessons such as the one given on page 37 of Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics into a multi-disciplinary unit without a tremendous amount of forethought and effort, especially in my first few years as a practitioner.
This isn’t to say that I would be a drill and kill each subject kind of teacher. I think that I can find a million ways to make subjects like math fun and entertaining while educational. I’m very excited to have access to some manipulatives in a math classroom and be able to do some hands-on learning, as well as teaching foundational math rather than playing catch-up and get them through. I’m also not saying that interweaving ELA through vocabulary into my Mathematics lessons or Mathematics into my Science, etc., lessons are things I would purposely avoid. In fact, just the opposite, but I would allow those to be natural consequences of backwards design from the primary lesson focus rather than intentionally aiming to create a mixed bundle.
All in all, this week’s readings forced me to reflect backwards on my teaching experience and forward to my future practice. As tough as it is to analyze oneself and put it down on paper, it’s always worth the effort!