Maths can be fun

• Talk about maths together. Find a puzzle or problem that involves maths and discuss it with your children. Many parents read books to children every night but never discuss maths with them. My friend used to put a maths puzzle in her son's lunchbox each day. He is now a mathematician.

• Encourage children to develop a flexible view of numbers. For example, think about adding two numbers such as 96 and 17 in your head. This may seem tricky, but if you break the 17 into 4 and 13 then the sum becomes 96 + 4 + 13, which for most people is much easier.

• Encourage children to think of themselves as great problem-solvers, and to see any maths problem as a puzzle they can solve through exploration and persistence.

• Last, but not least, if your child is not spending time in school working on diverse and varied mathematics, discussing ideas and problem solving, arrange to talk to your child's teacher or the school's maths co-ordinator and express your support for a problem-solving approach to maths.

Achievement Gap - uri treisman

Examples of closing achievement gap.

Green Tea is good for Teeth

Research shows that drinking green tea may be a good way to impress your dentist. In a study, the more green tea men drank, the better their gums fared during dental exams.

Differentiated Instruction

Went to see Ms. Caroline Tomlinson at UVA. She is the expert in "teaching in a differentiated way". Her words on her school web:

Major research interests include differentiation of instruction for academically diverse learners including teacher and administrator attitudes and practices related to academic diversity, impacts of initial teacher preparation on novice teacher readiness to teach in academically diverse settings, impacts of varied school and teaching practices on low income and minority learners, and the change process in schools moving toward more academically responsive classrooms.

Tracking is out. Students of all levels and all backgrounds will be in one room. A teacher needs to figure out where the students are, how they learn and tailor instructions to them.

Few major points:

Teach Up.
Spend time planning.
On-going assessments.
Start with one school and make sure principal and teachers buy in.
On-going efforts to support teachers. Can't be done with a mandate or few hours of staff training.
Build a teamwork or a sense of community in class.
Flexible grouping.

APA Festival May 2009, DC

APA festival in DC drew a good crowd. Good food, good conversations, and good music from Asian talents.

Met some folks at DC. APA film folks (www.apafilm.org) can be our friends. The have a film festival in October. We can probably ask them to show our (DVRP) clips inbetween films.

8th graders lost in algebra

THE MISPLACED MATH STUDENT:
LOST IN EIGHTH-GRADE ALGEBRA
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008

ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314

Abstract:

Scores in math have been rising. They’ve been rising since the early ’90s and they’ve made tremendous gains from 2000 to 2007. But the kids enrolled in our top classes have been declining. Now, that’s not to say anything about those classes themselves. As you’ll soon see, their composition has changed. They’ve been enrolling more kids who score at low levels.

And you can see now our misplaced kids, our 10th percentile kids, they scored 211. So my kind of ballpark estimate of where they function in mathematics is approximately at the second grade level. And they are enrolled, once again, in algebra, algebra 2, or geometry in eighth grade.

Now, to get an idea of what these students can and cannot do in mathematics, here is a sample item from NAPE. This is a public release item. It deals with percentages. By the way, all eighth graders have trouble with this item. You can see that overall only 36 percent of eighth graders can do it. In case you can’t do it, I checked the right answer for you there

There were 90 employees in a company. This year, the number of employees increased by 10 percent. How many employees are in the company this year?

So you have to compute 10 percent of 90 and you get 9 and then you add that onto 90 and you get 99. If you don’t do those two steps accurately, you miss the item.

You can see that in the advanced classes only about half the kids got that item right. So this item is missed by a lot of eighth graders. But our misplaced 10th kids, the 10th percentile kids, they really had trouble with it. Less than 10 percent, 9.8 percent got this item correct.

Recommendations:

Let’s make our goal that more students will learn algebra, not that they’ll take courses

The second recommendation is to teach and assess prerequisite skills leading up to algebra. Let’s make sure, for instance, they know fractions.

Most Interesting Sea Hider

Chameleon in the sea