Would you spend 100 hours of your summer vacation wrestling with
math problems?
If you still get sweaty palms thinking about high school algebra,
spending a month of your summer vacation solving math problems may
sound like pure punishment.
But the 16 students in Jeff Rabin’s
class at UCSD’s Algebraic
Thinking Institute (ATI) wouldn’t agree. Rabin is a UCSD
mathematics professor and his students are middle and high school
teachers from
the San Diego region. This diverse group, at various stages of
their careers, are in their second summer at the Institute. Upstairs,
the
first year students in UCSD mathematics education professor Guershon
Harel’s class also struggle with math problems. Both groups
are dedicated to the goal of becoming more effective teachers.
Typically, teachers take their subject courses before beginning
teacher training. These two sets of expertise are therefore learned
separately.
However, mathematics professor Alfred Manaster, the ATI coordinator,
and Rabin were profoundly influenced by a seminar Harel gave when
he was a visiting scholar at UCSD. Rabin stressed that it was important
to combine a deep understanding of mathematics with an understanding
of how people learn.
That conviction led Manaster to establish
ATI five years ago. “Content
and pedagogy are inextricably linked,” he explains. “You
can’t talk about one in the absence of the other.”
ATI
is about deep, sustained reasoning—the kind of thinking
that is also useful outside the classroom—not the drill and
kill symbol manipulation many of us experienced in school. In addition,
at ATI, teachers are encouraged to find multiple solutions to each
problem.
“
Different people reason in different ways,” explains Chuck
Carroll, a high school teacher at Valley Center High School, who
is back as a facilitator following two summers as a student at
ATI. “So
you might see up to five totally unique solutions.”
Being
armed with both the knowledge that people learn in different ways
and a tool kit of possible problem solutions is especially
beneficial for eighth-grade math teachers. San Diego teachers are
faced with
a more heterogeneous group of students now that all eighth-graders,
not just those excelling in math, must take algebra.
“
For the most part, I can do the problems, but I can’t always
do them the way my kids do,” explains Holly Bass, who teaches
math at Cortez Hill Academy in San Diego. “But now I have
seen so many ways to do them, I can say I’ll show you a couple
of ways and you can use whatever way is natural to you.”
Sadly,
although the teachers are emphatic that ATI has empowered them,
it currently looks as if next year’s institute might fall
victim to California’s ruthless budget cutbacks. But for
the teachers who were fortunate enough to be a part of ATI over
the last five
years, ATI’s impact will be long-lasting. “That’s
the whole thing,” sums up Joyce Rhee, who teaches math at
Rancho Buena Vista High School in Vista. “We’ve grown
as mathematicians.”
And for their students, too, the future
looks brighter. “We
have provided challenges that many of our colleagues insisted were
too difficult for our students,” says Katie Barger, who teaches
mathematics at Helix Charter High School in La Mesa. “We
have come back to our colleagues with data that shows success among
our students.
Our students initially felt our classes were too hard, but their
tone changed as pride set in.”
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