Keeping Mathematics Relevant

On By TDMagnusIn President's Message, Uncategorized

By Terri Magnus, NHTM Past-President

I hope you are enjoying your summer and taking some time for yourself before the next school year. I’m enjoying travel, hiking, reading, and gardening and recognize how much I needed this break. At the same time, I’ve found time to have quality, low-stress discussions with other math educators about what we would like to achieve in our classrooms and ideas for getting there. In addition to NHTM, I participate in NE-COMMIT (New England Community for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching), a group of collegiate and high school teachers dedicated to equitable teaching of mathematics through inquiry.

My term as NHTM president ended in spring and I am working with our new president Natalya Vinogradova as she transitions into her new role. Natalya is very interested in bringing professional development and in-person conferences back to NHTM and I look forward to seeing this next stage for our organization. On the other hand, the president alone cannot do the work of the organization. We need volunteers both within and beyond the NHTM board to step up and share their time and expertise. We are thrilled to welcome several new board members:

  • Secretary: Laurie Brody, Mountain View Middle School, Goffstown
  • Post-Secondary Representative: Jennifer Carrobis, Southern New Hampshire University
  • Media & Public Relations: Shawn Hackshaw, Professional tutor, former high school teacher at Raymond High School
  • School Administrative Representative: Christine Downing, Kearsarge School District (Principal Sutton Central School and Secondary Curriculum Director)

The last two are not new to NHTM. Shawn coordinated the State Mathematics Contest for several years and Christine is a past president of NHTM. Welcome back!

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the following outgoing board members: Natalie Laflamme (Secretary), Raina Eckhardt-Houle (Post-Secondary Representative), Jessica Jacques (Media & Public Relations), and Stephanie Wheeler (School Administrative Representative). Each contributed substantially both in their roles and beyond. It is always hard to say goodbye and we are glad that they expressed willingness to help NHTM out in the future. So hopefully, we will continue to see them assisting or presenting at conferences, participating in regional events, or even returning to the board in the future.

Kudos also go out to the continuing board members. We’ve faced a lot of challenges both within our organization and in our schools and I have been impressed with everyone’s ability to balance demands and still work toward the needs of NH teachers. We’ve learned how to deliver professional development and hold meetings virtually while also recognizing the shortcomings of the virtual environment and preparing for a return to in-person interaction. I couldn’t have done my job without you all and I look forward to our continued work and camaraderie this year! We are looking for a webmaster so if you or someone you know is a math educator who enjoys playing with websites and would like to be a part of the NHTM Board, please let us know!

Our work as an organization of mathematics educators continues, and our mission of advocating for quality mathematics education for all is more important than ever. But what do we mean by quality mathematics education? What mathematics is important, for whom is it important, and how should it be taught? Why do we require our students to take 12 years of mathematics and why should we continue to do so in the future? What is to be gained now that everyone has access to calculators?

Unfortunately, in recent decades mathematics education has been driven by our testing culture. Test scores are used to assess not only students, but teachers, districts, and the nation. Students with good test scores are guided toward advanced educational opportunities, parents pay for tutors to get their kids ahead, and test prep programs are big business. High-stakes testing, in turn, pushes the emphasis of mathematics education to that which can easily be assessed; namely, problems with a single right answer, procedures that can be mimicked, and a bag of tricks that can be used. While assessment is important for identifying what our students can do and how to help them progress, our emphasis our test preparation has turned mathematics into a rite of passage rather than a field to be explored, enjoyed, and applied.

Many of our students have no idea why they should bother with mathematics other than it being a graduation requirement. Even many math teachers struggle to answer the question of why their students need to learn mathematics. Promises that it will eventually be useful or threats that they need to pass the test are poor motivators. In fact, our emphasis on speed, correction, and procedural algorithms is convincing students that they are not “math persons” and killing their interest.

The goal of mathematics should not be to learn simply how to complete a square or to solve a system of linear equations or to compute an integral. Instead, our students need to learn how to think independently, make sense of data, and make well-informed decisions. We face many challenges at home, in our communities, in our nation, and in our world that can and should be addressed mathematically. Many of us teachers already include personal finance to motivate mathematics while developing important life skills at the same time. We can use probability to study the cost and benefits of insurance and unit conversions to evaluate whether to buy a more efficient car.

But, as Karim Ani describes in his book Dear Citizen Math, we teachers tend to use the applications to learn or practice mathematics rather than using mathematics to explore and understand the world around us. In doing so, we find ourselves altering the application and forcing it to meet our curricular needs. Students rightly see the problems as contrived and irrelevant. In real life, the answers are messy; there is usually no right or wrong answer. Even with a relatively simple example of deciding whether to buy a more fuel-efficient car, we are left with many unknowns. For example, how will the cost of gas change over the next few years and what repairs may be needed and how much will they cost? An individual’s decision may ultimately be based on how important emissions reduction is to them or how much they like one car over the other. Do they have the money now or will they take out a loan, and how will the purchase affect their situation? Even though we don’t know the exact costs and there is no one correct answer, it is still in the buyer’s best interest to analyze the situation mathematically before making the decision. Mathematics allows us to dig deeper and discover the hidden factors that lie below the surface. Mathematical analysis can be used throughout students’ lives and helps students see why mathematics is important. Word problems do not.

With technology at our fingertips, the ability to interpret data, set up a linear system, or develop a function to model a real-world scenario has become more important than the ability to perform the hand calculations to complete the problem! Foundational knowledge is still essential for full understanding and enlarging our toolkit, but would our students be more attentive if we used applications to motivate mathematical learning rather than postponing them until the end (if we get to them at all)? Just about any topic can be analyzed mathematically—cafeteria use, climate change, housing and food availability, bus routes and school schedules, vote-tallying methods, the effect of a new grocery/restaurant/after school program in town, whether to wait in a long line—and the analyses can be adapted to mathematical level and upcoming curriculum of the students.

We have become a politically divided nation where we have turned against each other, putting our political party allegiance ahead of our democratic union. Headlines and memes get our attention, and rarely do we Americans dig below the surface to find out what factors have contributed to our world’s problems and what the long-term effects of our decisions might be. We assume that our views are right and others’ are wrong, when in reality there is no clear distinction. Polling shows that most voters have opinions that lie somewhere in the middle, but the commonalities and gray areas are absent from the public discourse. As mathematics teachers, we may find it comforting to teach a discipline where the content is less controversial and the answers retrievable, but is that how our students will apply their learning after graduation? Instead, mathematics offers a means to explore the complexity of our world, to support and refute claims with data, and to make informed predictions and decisions. Engagement with real world data and problems makes students aware that there often are no right or wrong answers, that the best course of action may have some adverse consequences while ideas that appear less favorable may have some advantages. Topics to be investigated can come from lesson plans such as those in the GAIMME (Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Mathematical Modeling Education) Report, Citizen Math website, or New York Times Learning Network, or by simply listening to the news or your students’ concerns and wondering why. Perhaps, your colleagues in other disciplines can suggest ways to coordinate with their lessons. Even something as simple as adding to a temperature graph in the classroom each day can help build students curiosity and predictive skills and set the stage for the later study of graphs and functions and let the students or school librarian help with the research. Choose exploration topics and motivate mathematical methods that are appropriate for your class. The applications do not have to be completely realistic; estimating the number of ping pong balls needed to fill your classroom or trying to understand an alien’s number system (base five) can reap rewards as well. Creating art and exploring infinity are two other areas where students may find the application of mathematics intriguing.

Still, most of the traditional concepts are essential tools to empower our students to use mathematics; hence, many need to remain in the curriculum. Just as with our life decisions, mathematics education should not be all applications nor all computational nor all theoretical. Instead, it is the integration of these that makes the field so important and valued. Make time for applications and explorations and not just at the end of the year!

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