Making math fun after pandemic setbacks

Transcript:

Anne:

Welcome to Education Beat. I’m Anne Vasquez, executive director of EdSource.

Anne:

Performance on California’s standardized math test completely stalled last year, when most students were stuck at home in remote learning. New analysis shows that students began falling behind even before the pandemic, starting in third grade. The pandemic made a bad problem worse. As a parent of two children in public schools, I watched the effect in real time in my own living room. My fifth grader studiously worked on her dry erase board during her math lessons last year. She completed all of her classwork and all of her homework, but by the end of the year, it was clear that she and her classmates were not as prepared as they would have been had a global crisis not upended their school year. One analyst calls last year’s scores a five alarm fire that should be taken seriously. Some teachers are working hard to get students excited about math and make up for lost time now that they are back in school in person.

Sandhya:

The word boring that’s the most common word that people use with math. Math can be fun.

Anne:

Here is this week’s Education Beat with host Zaidee Stavely.

Zaidee:

When Sandhya Raman was in seventh grade in India, her teacher told her mom that she would never learn math. She said Sandhya should never get into a career that required math because she said she just wasn’t a math person. Sandhya defied that advice. She went on to become a software engineer, and now she teaches sixth and seventh grade math herself at Morrill Middle School in Berryessa Union School District in San Jose. She makes it a personal mission not to repeat the mistake her teacher made.

Sandhya:

I don’t wanna be that person for anybody. I don’t don’t want math to be a memorization. I don’t want math to be something that I’m telling you you need to do this to get this answer. Math is not about an answer. Math is about exploration and seeing it.

Zaidee:

When I interviewed Sandhya after school one day, she was wearing a green sweatshirt with the exact opposite message from the one her teacher gave her so many years ago. Her shirt read, “You are a math person”.

Sandhya:

I am a math person. Everybody’s a math person.

Zaidee:

It’s clear to me that Sandhya is a great teacher. She loves math, loves teaching math, and she also loves teaching middle school.

Sandhya:

All those hormones at play. I say milk it! Let’s just take advantage of it. And emotions at high are always a plus. So let’s take advantage of that and make merry while it lasts. High schoolers to me are almost adults. I feel that in the middle school ages, it’s easy to steer them, to inspire them, and to motivate them and show them the beauty of math. Like my math is not just two plus two. There is math around you. There’s math in what you do every day. If that concept, that visualization, that abstract thinking develops in the middle school years, I think high school will be even more joyous so they can explore more and they can dig deeper and they can pursue a path that they like. So I think it’s important to give them the joy and let them investigate. Let them explore that in these middle school ages.

Zaidee:

The fact that many students didn’t progress much on math tests last year, doesn’t surprise Sandhya. She says it was really hard to teach math online and people were going through a lot.

Sandhya:

A lot of us, including me, lost a lot of family during the pandemic time. So obviously academics was not the priority for those cases. And being in California, we have wildfires that really hit us really hard. We were, a lot of my school’s neighborhood were evacuated that year we went into the pandemic. So when your house is at stake, when your loved ones are in jeopardy, I believe academics is not a priority. So I’m thinking it’s that being a big reason. Plus the fact that not all students are just auditory learners, they need the kinesthetic feel. They need the sensory tiles, and the manipulatives that we offer in class. They need the one-on-one support. As much as we tried, we were probably not able to accomplish a hundred percent either. Like how many times a day would you sit and stare at a screen? And if I am the last teacher during the day, and I see the student at two o’clock on a screen, they’re checked out because they’re tired.

Zaidee:

This year Sandhya’s students came to her with a much wider range of skills.

Sandhya:

With my sixth grade class, I have some students who are still struggling to, say, add fractions with uncommon denominator, which is an elementary level standard, but they’re expected to be mastering that content in sixth grade. So they still need help with that, which is okay. And also others in the class are ready to do things like fraction division and fraction multiplication, which is something that is opened up to them only in the sixth grade levels. So I cannot rely on one blanket lesson plan to just address the 33, 34 students in my class because each student, and this is a big chunk of the students, which are in diverse learning levels. So I have to cater and meet them where they are.

Zaidee:

This is Education Beat, getting to the heart of California schools. I’m Zaidee Stavely. This week, making math fun for everyone.

Zaidee:

The way Sandhya Raman teaches math is inspiring. But not everyone is teaching that way yet. And students have been struggling. A recent analysis by David Wakelyn looked at the Smarter Balanced Test results for math. And he looked at them in a different way than how the state department of education does it. Usually we compare one year’s results to the previous year’s results, but he looked at how each group of students has done over time. From third grade to eighth grade. My colleague John Fensterwald wrote about the analysis for EdSource.

Zaidee:

Hi John.

John:

Hey Zaidee.

Zaidee:

So tell me about these math scores. What exactly do they tell us? And I know they were taken during the pandemic during distance learning. So, you know, how much emphasis should we put on them?

John:

What he showed was, you know, really, it was an important warning that beginning in third grade, students overall in California begin to fall behind standard, where they should be. And by the time you got to eighth grade last year, 2021, the average California student was three years behind where he or she should be in standards. And for low income kids and Latino and black kids, it was as much as four years behind.

Zaidee:

Basically before the pandemic eighth graders were already testing below grade level in math. Had about a sixth grade level on average. In 2021 though, during distance learning, eighth grade students who tested, got results at about a fifth grade level.

John:

They’re serious caveats about it. They took it during the pandemic. They took it remotely. And only one quarter of California students actually took the Smarter Balance because it was an option last year. You could do your own local assessments.

Zaidee:

Sandhya Raman told us that, one, distance learning just was really hard to do in math. Like it was hard to make math exciting and you couldn’t use manipulatives in the same way. You couldn’t do like hands-on learning in the same way. And then she also spoke just about the adverse conditions that students and teachers were facing.

John:

Yeah. That’s all true. Basically it showed how difficult it was to teach math remotely during the pandemic. So all these are important factors, but nonetheless, it’s a clear warning. It’s a clear signal. It’s not finger-wagging a teacher saying you did a bad job. It saying, boy, when you come back, you’re going to have a wide variety of skills of in your class. Now some of your students are going to be so far behind. This is what David calledin his op-ed, a five alarm fire. So we’ve got to perhaps rethink our strategies for how we can reach this huge disparity of kids coming into our classroom, again, this year when they’ve got all kinds of issues they’re bringing in.

Zaidee:

So what are some of the solutions people are talking about?

John:

Well, what David hoped, and what I hope as well, is it starts a real conversation as to how do you deal now with that situation. Is a longer year going to work? Is a longer day going to work? Is tutoring the answer? Or do we go back to sort of grouping that we sort of pull kids out or have separate classes on ability based on how far they are behind? Can teachers really teach effectively when students have that wide disparities? And I think the teachers that I talk to, and Mrs. Raman represents that, is they’re really committed to continue to teaching grade standards to whoever is in the class. And recognizing, well, she works really hard. She comes in the morning, she stays at night, she goes into one-on-one when she can. But that’s an enormous challenge. And I think she does it very well. But you need instruction to understand how you do this. And you need textbooks that approach it in that fashion. And many California school districts do not have that. They do not have textbooks still that are aligned to Common Core. Although we’ve had the Common Core Standards now for nearly a decade.

Zaidee:

Sandhya Raman has a goal this year.

Sandhya:

Look at math from a fun perspective. Math can be fun. It’s not I mean, I don’t use the word boring ever. That’s the most common word that people use with math. That’s our goal this time. Just look around you and see how you can find the joy in math.

Zaidee:

She’s changed some of the ways she’s teaching to help reach all the students in her classes at whatever level they’re at.

Sandhya:

One of the big things that I have adopted in all my classes this year is like, we have a mandatory Fun Friday. We do a Fun Friday task. It’s still math, but I call it Fun Friday and they kind of completely get carried away with the title of the task. And it’s an open-ended, deep, rich task. And what it offers to them is everybody can get started. If it’s my kid who is ready to tackle the three grade level up thing, or whether it’s my student who needs a little scaffolding down, they all begin at some point in the task. And then they can build their way up or they can linger around in that area of comfort. But these are tasks that have multiple ways to do it. There’s no one set method. There’s no rule there that you have to do it only one way. So it kind of validates their thinking and it gives opportunities to listen to what others did. So it got them excited. It got me excited. And we are on the walls in the class. I have whiteboards all around my class. So they go around walking, doing the work on a marker. And then they go around looking at everybody’s work. So it’s a fun social chaos, but they are doing math.

Zaidee:

She gives the students choices of different assignments they can do. Different ways they can learn the same content. She gives them more opportunities to retake tests. And she lets them bring notes to tests.

Sandhya:

This is another thing that I do. I tell them, you can make your own cheat sheet and bring it to the test. So you can’t really use your notebook, but you’re using a cheat sheet. And they’re like what? You’re doing a cheat sheet? I can use a cheat sheet? And they spend hours trying to make the cheat sheet. And to me, that’s great revision. But they’re happy. I’m happy. They get to work. They learn. They don’t realize that it’s easy, but they’re working hard. So the moment you set the bar in a way where they feel that they can achieve it and then push the bar up, I think it’s way more friendly than being that harsh, strict math person they don’t want to be in the class with. So those have worked, plus I give them a lot of time to socialize and chitchat.

Zaidee:

John says some education advocacy organizations are asking the state to prioritize math just as much as they’re now emphasizing early literacy. The governor is proposing 500 million dollars in the new budget to hire and train literacy coaches and reading specialists.

John:

But there’s not the same attention, nor funding, nor opportunities to do that in math, there is a bill in the legislature that would fund 388 million dollars over several years. And I think it would provide teachers on two levels, it would create networks of teachers on a state-wide level to enable teachers to work across district lines. And at the same time, there is funding to pay for math coaches and within schools to improve instruction. When the gaps are so wide, a fourth grade teacher really needs to have an understanding of where students are coming from in second grade and where they might be in sixth grade. And make those connections. And present it in concepts that make the broader connections of fractions and proportions and things so that students see, oh yeah, this begins to make sense.

Zaidee:

I know that there’s all this research that shows that if teachers, if adults, parents and teachers don’t feel confident in their own math skills, maybe they, like you said, a bad experience in school or someone told them they weren’t good at math, or it was just very hard for them, that it’s so much harder for them to get their kids excited about math, or be able to see math as something that could be fun or something that they don’t have to fail at. It’s more about the pathway of doing the math.

John:

Exactly. And also seeing the practical applications. Why am I doing fractions? Why am I doing volume? And to look around and see actually practical applications in your life every day, whether it’s cooking, or the like, using proportions, these are approaches that engage kids and get them interested in math. The only thing Zaidee, I think it’s really hard to do and it’s very time consuming. And so one of the recognitions, you’re not gonna get through all the standards every year with this approach. And there may be ways you can bring tutors and working one-on-one in the classroom on the subject that you’re working on, but it’s very hard and time consuming. And it’s a lot easier to do direct instruction and teach procedures than this kind of engagement. So, you know, it’s gonna, reignite that debate as to where do you use direct instruction and where do you use this kind of engagement and let students solve things on their own, which may take a longer amount of time. You know, it requires this kind of commitment and statewide effort that we recognize it’s important, that we can’t lose a generation of kids without dealing with this forthrightly and with full resources and attention.

Zaidee:

When you were working on this story, I know you talked with a bunch of teachers and folks who are working with training with teachers. Were there any anecdotes that they told you from the classroom that sort of stood out to you?

John:

Well, there was one from Oak Grove School District in San Jose. They’re beginning to look at the framework and learn it. And there’s an Institute at Stanford that is beginning to train these teachers in saying, how do we go about doing it? You’re sort of the Guinea pigs for us. And they’re very excited to get to have an all day sessions at Stanford and learning how to do the frameworks. And one teacher came back, I think it was third or fourth grade teacher, and mentioned to the lead teacher said, you know, my kids we were doing this. We were doing some exercises with manipulatives. And by the end of the morning, it was lunchtime. And the kids said, well, when are we gonna do math? And the teacher said, you know, this is really succeeding when in fact they’re engaged and they’re having fun. It’s not what they thought math was because math was bringing out your workbooks and doing problems and then going off to lunch at noon. But you know, this may work.

Zaidee:

Sandhya is hopeful that students will improve their math skills this year.

Sandhya:

We teachers are really trying more than ever before. And I can say that for every single one of us out there, because we know what happened in the past few years. And we know that we don’t wanna repeat that. And we all want the best for the students. Not just the scores. We all want them to be successful. So we have done a lot. We have achieved a lot this year. I am hoping that the scores are better, but even if that’s not the case at the end of the year, I just hope that every student goes out of that school year, that building, way more confident than they stepped into that math classroom on that first day, this year. So more than anything else, if they see that difference, if they can reflect how far they have achieved their own math goal, I think that is brilliant.

Zaidee:

And she goes to school every day, looking forward to an “aha” moment.

Sandhya:

The way they express their understanding or comprehension or a milestone is really, really, really a wonderful moment. That is one of my biggest moments, whether it is when they divide fractions, or whether they see how a negative and positive makes zero, or whether it is how they see a three dimensional shape pop from a two dimensional shape, the exhilaration in their eyes and in their body language is gratifying. It’s really so wonderful.

Zaidee:

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Education Beat, getting to the heart of California schools, a production of EdSource. You can find John’s story at edsource.org. Our producer is Coby McDonald. Special thanks to our guests Sandhya Raman and John Fensterwald and our director Anne Vasquez. Our theme music is from Blue Dot Sessions. This episode was brought to you by the Stuart Foundation. I’m Zaidee Stavely. Join me next week. And don’t forget to subscribe.