Saturday, May 30, 2009

An Interesting Calculus

So, I wanted to know why so many of our sixth grade students couldn't do sixth grade math. As a language arts teacher, it's hard for me to figure out, not because I don't know math-- believe me, I've been in sixth grade a long time, and I'm down with the curriculum-- but because I don't know the kids as math students. We disaggregate the data by race, ethnicity, gender, special needs, and socio-economic status, so I understood the profile of the kids who failed, but I wanted to know why. Is it developmental? Intellectual? Cultural? I asked the math teacher what she thought.

We talked a bit, and she was fairly non-judgmental in her description of what she saw. Her theory was that it was SES more than anything else, and related to that was the level of those students' parents' education, as well as their knowledge of English. (Yeah, a lot of Latino kids failed.) One point she made was very thought-provoking to me: When parents of struggling students sit next to their children in meetings with the teacher and admit that they can't help with math, because they don't know it themselves, it sends a powerful message to their kids. If this math is too hard for their parents, who are successful, working adults, how can the kids ever learn it? And, on some level, why should they bother?

It's not the full picture, but it is an interesting piece of the puzzle, and I still think that we need to understand any problem as fully as possible before we start proposing answers.

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