Focus Ch. 7 - MATH

Focus Ch. 7 – MATH

            As someone who struggled with math in school myself and see so many of my students struggling with math, this chapter really hit home.  Math is the “most failed” subject (pg. 195).  Right now I am in the middle of our Algebra unit for 6^th grade and my class is really, really struggling so reading what Schmoker wrote about Algebra made me feel a bit better.  The textbook does not have very many word problems that actually show how you would use Algebra in everyday life.  It uses a, b, c and gives the formula but it makes no sense to my kids at times.  The examples it will give are not things students typically deal with or need to write an expression to solve.  I also struggle with giving a real world example with many of the concepts because I haven’t really had to use too much Algebra in my adult life.  It was shocking to read Schmoker’s examples of scientists and computer programmers who said the same thing!  The fact that “less than 5 percent of the workforce use Algebra II or more advanced math” (pg. 199) was surprising as well.  However, I do believe that if we want our students to compete in a global world students do need to be at a higher level of proficiency in math than they currently are.  My students’ main roadblock in understanding Algebra is the fact that they don’t know their multiplication facts or even simple fractions (it took me 5 minutes today to get a student to realize that 4/4 is the same as 1 when she was trying to subtract ¼ from 1 and we have already studied fractions this year!  I tried comparing it to quarters and it confused her even more!) or some math basics (like basic measurement units, simple fractions being the same as a decimal (1/2 = .5) etc).  Students can’t do mental math very well so it slows them down with the more complex math even if I let them use a calculator.  I liked Schmoker’s idea for using data and real life tables, charts, and information to make Math applicable but I wish the textbooks would do a little of that for us as it isn’t easy to find examples all the time.  I think a great idea would be for textbooks to have links to articles or videos that you could use to illustrate how a certain concept is used in everyday life.  Since this is my first year of teaching 6^th grade math I haven’t had the years to accumulate and find these resources to relate to each math concept or unit, and if we want it done we have to make it easy for teachers to do!   Hope some textbook writers will read “Focus” and see the need for this.