All posts by Spencer Olmsted

5th Grade Teacher, Pioneer Elementary

Shape Classification

image001This month we are working on classifying quadrilaterals. Creating these overlapping hierarchies is  always a challenge. Relationships that work one way, don’t work the other way, and there is a lot of specific vocabulary that needs to be learned and applied in novel situations.

It’s a little like this: everyone who lives in Olympia lives in Washington, but not everyone who lives in Washington lives in Olympia. Bringing it back to the shapes – all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

To do this work, we need to know the defining characteristics of the quadrilaterals that we are classifying – and here we run into yet another difficulty… mathematicians don’t always agree on these! But the work of classification goes on. We just learn the specific characteristics and create the relationships accordingly. Here is a table that tries to communicate these overlapping relationships.

quads-3Under the inclusive definition of trapezoids, all six shapes a the top of this post are trapezoids, under the exclusive definition only three of them are… can you spot them?

Ninety-Ten

90-10We were playing this game in math class today called “I have, You need” during which the number ninety-ten came to my attention.

The game is pretty simple – one person thinks of a number between 1 and 99 and the other person comes up with the number that will add to that number to make 100. Warming up we start with numbers like 30, 45, 75 etc. Then we move on to more difficult numbers like 37. Many students will think first that 73 is the matching pair. This is because they want to make 100 and they know that 30 and 70 go together. When I explained ninety-ten, the problem became much easier. They were now trying to make nine tens, so 63 was immediately identified.

Sometimes we need to think about numbers a little differently. From place value to working from left to right, there is much more freedom in math than we’ve been led to believe. Create something new!

101qs

955-san-francisco-house

What’s the first question that comes to your mind?

Dan Meyer, prolific blogger, high school math teacher, and current Ph.D. student at Stanford wants to know. Dan has decided that there are way too many artificial scenarios in his high school math texts that pretend to model the world. He wants to see the real world in his math class because he sees the math in the real world.

101qs.com is the brainchild of Dan Meyer. On this site, anyone can post an image or a short video and let the world ask the math questions that naturally arise from the scene.

From this, he and many of his followers have created lessons where the students can generate the questions (probably the ones that the teacher has in mind), ask for any relevant information they need, and solve real problems the way they would in the real world.

It’s fantastic – check it out, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself seeing math problems everywhere.

How about this one?66-the-ticket-roll

How many do you think there are? What number is just too many? What number is too few? Be brave.

What do you need to know?

YouCubed (and more on fluency)

youcubed-thumbJo Boaler, a math education researcher and professor at Stanford University, launched a new website this past year (YouCubed) to help teachers, students, and parents navigate math education. She recently published a short paper on math fluency. In it she discusses the problems with associating math fluency with speed or memorization.

Interestingly, the Common Core intends this de-emphasis on speed but the word “fluency” is often misunderstood by textbook publishers. The newly adopted Bridges Curriculum seems not fall into this category – their strategy for building fluency is based strongly on number sense. (Read an excerpt from Jo’s paper below)

This past September the Conservative education minister for England, a man with no education experience, insisted that all students in England memorize all their times tables up to 12 x 12 by the age of 9. This requirement has now been placed into the UK’s mathematics curriculum and will result, I predict, in rising levels of math anxiety and students turning away from mathematics in record numbers. The US is moving in the opposite direction, as the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) de-emphasize the rote memorization of math facts. Unfortunately misinterpretations of the meaning of the word ‘fluency’ in the CCSS are commonplace and publishers continue to emphasize rote memorization, encouraging the persistence of damaging classroom practices across the United States.

Math Anxiety and Fluency

stress

Math anxiety is real and it affects about half of the U.S. population. Brain imaging has shown us that stress gets in the way of working memory, which is typically required to do mathematics. In fact, math anxiety seems to affect people with a high amount of working memory most! One of the main sources of math anxiety is the stress produced by timed tests (Boaler, Education Week, 7/3/2012).

I used to have my students take timed multiplication and division tests to practice fact (computational) fluency, but I don’t do this anymore. Time is too heavily factored into the measure of fluency in that equation. Rather, I have students learn and practice strategies for working with numbers so that they can be fluent.

Here’s a tip for developing the habit of seeing patterns in numbers: spend more time looking for patterns in math homework and throughout school mathematics. School math is designed to illustrate patterns! Though this is sometimes a weakness in that a framework is often given and problems are explicitly trying to illustrate relationships, this will help students (who attend to these patterns) develop strategic thinking.

Take for example two problems from last night’s homework.

  1. Kaden divided 96 by 12 and then multiplied by 6. Write an expression to show the problem. Then, solve the problem and write an equation.

When most students first approach a problem like this, they begin to decode or solve it step by step. First they do 96 divided by 12 getting… what is that anyway? And then they multiply by 6.

When I look at that problem, the first thing I notice is that 96 is being divided and multiplied. These are inverse operations – meaning that they undo each other. If the problem was 96 divided by 12 times 12, I hope we would just leave it at 96 because we all know this doing and undoing relationship. In this case, the situation is only slightly less humorous (mathematically speaking). If we are going to divide 96 by 12 and then multiply by 6, then we are undoing the dividing by 6! This leaves a much simpler expression: 96 / 2 (96 divided by 2). The equation I would write would read 96 / 12 * 6 = 96 /2 = 48. That’s number fluency.

  1. 81 – (9 * 7)

Here too, most of my students given this for homework followed the “proper steps” and dutifully multiplied 9 * 7 and then subtracted that from 81. This misses a beautiful relationship embedded in the problem. If you notice that 81 is also a multiple of 9, you can rewrite the problem in the following way.

81 – (9 * 7) = (9 * 9) – (9 * 7)

We are subtracting 7 groups of 9 from 9 groups of 9. The difference is 9 * 2.

When most people think about what mathematics is, they think about memorization and procedures. I think this is what it felt like coming through the system for a lot of people in my generation. Today, in many classrooms around the world, math is taught around understanding ideas, discovering relationships, exploring patterns, and developing strategic thinking and problem solving skills.

The difference between memorizing a bunch of rules and procedures and coming to understand mathematical ideas and principles is profound. Memorization requires no real reflection or ownership. There is often very little connection between the learner and the material. As a result, the learning is shallow and has very little application outside of school for that student. Teaching number fluency with conceptual understanding on the other hand requires more engagement with the material. It challenges students to come to terms with a deeply interconnected and vibrant discipline. I believe it also opens the door to a real relationship with mathematics that can help students avoid math anxiety.

Mathematics is sometimes called the science of pattern and order. This is exactly what draws people to math – let’s keep that perception of the subject alive when we are actually doing math work.