By the numbers: Teachers bone up on math
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Published: November 18, 2001
By LISA RATHKE The Associated Press
HARTLAND — Angela Turgeon-Ladeau talks about numbers, factors, decimals, percentages and fractions while teaching her sixth-grade class.
But she’s boning up on algebra, geometry and trigonometry on the side.
She’s returned to school to get her master’s in math instruction through the Vermont Math Initiative, a state program designed to help elementary school teachers better teach math.
Instead of memorizing method and computation, she and more than 100 other teachers from around the state are learning where formulas come from, why they’re used and how they relate to other math concepts.
They learn how to solve the same problem both algebraically and geometrically.
“I feel like I’m developing a deeper understanding,” said Turgeon-Ladeau.
She’s transferred that into her classroom by encouraging her sixth-graders to look at problem-solving in more than one way.
“It will help make their learning more meaningful so they can pluck it out of their brain later,” she said of her new approach.
That’s the ultimate goal of the Vermont Math Initiative.
“I’m trying to build understanding so that kids will be able to study math for a long time,” said Kathy Nolan, who teaches sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade math in Island Pond.
In a nutshell, primary school teachers need to know algebra, trigonometry, probability and calculus to understand why and what they teach in grade school, said VMI director Ken Gross, a University of Vermont mathematician.
“If you’re teaching first-grade reading, would you teach a teacher first-grade reading? No,” he said.
For some of the teachers, the classes are a challenging review of concepts they learned long ago. For others, who stumbled through math and missed concepts because of the way they were taught when they were in school, the program has opened their eyes to math, filled in the gaps and given them a new understanding.
“When I was in college the emphasis was not in mathematics,” said Linda Parker, a fourth-grade teacher in Windsor, who’s in her third year of VMI. She’s been teaching for 32 years. Even though she received the national presidential award for math instruction several years ago, she said she always knew there were gaps in her education.
“The program has kind of connected all the dots. Nothing ever seemed to relate to anything else and nothing ever seemed to relate to elementary-school math.”
It’s the connections between different math forms and the patterns that repeat themselves no matter what level of math is being taught that are most profound for teachers.
“It’s the interrelationships,” said Jean Kendrick, a first-grade teacher in Hartland. “You learn you can solve a problem algebraically, geometrically.”
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VMI came about in part as a response to a national report that said students were not learning math and science at a level that would keep the country economically competitive, Gross said.
From there, new math standards were developed. By a certain grade, students had to learn arithmetic, some geometry and some statistics. Their progress is assessed in fourth and eighth grade through the new standards reference exam.
States responded with their own programs, or ways of teaching, but the teachers weren’t necessarily educated enough to teach the concepts.
“If you don’t know the mathematics, they’re just activities,” Gross said of the standards-based math programs.
Then Marc Hull, at the time Vermont’s education commissioner, asked teachers what they lacked. The resounding response was they needed to learn more math.
“The foundation of it was that teachers need and wanted strengthening of their contents in mathematics,” said Marge Petit, who served as deputy education commissioner for four years and helped develop VMI. “Now that there were higher expectations for kids in mathematics, teachers needed higher knowledge of mathematics.”
Hull and Petit approached Gross with their idea.
“To be honest, when I got into this program, I thought we’ll try it out this summer to see what happens,” Gross said of VMI’s first year in 1999. “I had two rules. Number one is that we treat teachers like the CEO of a company. Number two was we teach serious mathematics. We want teachers to think like mathematicians.”
The more competent that teachers become in math the more confident they will be in the classroom, he said.
VMI hopes to turn out 300 elementary school teachers around the state with master’s degrees in math instruction by 2006. The graduates will act as teacher leaders, helping their own schools and others strengthen the teaching of math.
So far it’s paying off.
“A lot of teachers go into the program because they’re math phobic,” said Jeff Wakefield, a spokesman for UVM. “The comments from teachers go from being extremely apprehensive to ... they become math zealots, extremists”
“It just took off,” Gross said. “The teachers loved it, and they worked so hard. I’ve been a teacher for 40 years and this is the most enjoyable teaching I’ve done in my life.”
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Gross is one of 12 instructors from colleges and universities around the state who teach at VMI. They come together from Vermont Technical College and Norwich and from St. Michael’s College and UVM to teach their areas of expertise.
The program is a partnership among the state, the University of Vermont, the state colleges, two private universities, and the Vermont Institute of Mathematics, Science and Technology.
Teachers take four three-credit courses a year. They have intensive classes for two weeks in the summer, two weekends in the fall and three weekends in the spring.
The state pays for half the tuition, and the school districts pay the other half. At $840 per course, “it’s quite an investment for the state,” Gross said. “It’s the only state I know of that’s taking a long-term look at this problem — investing in three years in teachers’ training.”
There are other programs like it around the country but none as focused on elementary school teachers, Gross said.
The small size of Vermont and the support from the education department helped get it off the ground so efficiently.
“Ken has done it,” said Paul Sally, a University of Chicago math professor who created the EveryDay Math program and a program like VMI for middle school teachers in Chicago. “There is nothing as coordinated as VMI for a full state.”
He said it could be used as a model for other states.
Right now it’s changing how math is taught in Vermont schools.
“It shows us that math can be fun,” said Parker, who teaches fourth grade. “For so long math was one of the subjects that wasn’t fun. It was hard to make it fun when all you’re teaching is number sense — addition subtraction and division — and the kids aren’t getting it.
“Now I’m teaching probability, they love probability. I’m teaching data collecting, they love to collect data. We’re teaching geometry. At this age, they love shapes. ... There are so many ways to teach math to make it relevant to their lives.”
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