On Cloud Nine

Here’s a question:

Why do we let people who are math-phobic and functionally innumerate teach math to grade schoolers?

My answer?

For some reason, it’s perfectly acceptable to be innumerate in our society.  People will casually tell you that they can’t add a fraction to save their lives.  Imagine someone saying, “Novels? Are you kidding? I can barely read a comic book.” There are, of course, adults who can’t read.  But no one thinks it’s funny.

Every elementary school has a literacy specialist these days.  Often, they have two or three.  Every elementary school teacher spends a lot of time learning how to teach reading.   Not so for math.  It drives me crazy.

Where are the national commissions that compile lists of research-validated practices? There are plenty of innovative math curricula.  And some of it is backed by research.  But it’s nothing like we have for reading.  And even when the curriculum is great, if the teacher doesn’t really understand numbers in deep ways, the curriculum is irrelevant.

Okay, enough of my rant.

I always thought of myself as a good math teacher.  I worked my tail off, and when my students did the same, we made a lot of progress.  My students always did better on their state mandated tests than other students in the school did, and I was proud of my work.

Still, I had many, many students with whom I felt wholly inadequate.  They came to me in high school unable to multiply or add simple numbers in their head.  They didn’t understand the meaning of simple words in problem, words like of and from.  We often found work-arounds for them, but we never did figure out how to go back to ground zero and work our way back up.

Part of the problem was that I wasn’t sure where ground zero was.  I knew that they had no concept of our base ten system, and sometimes we would go back to that.  But that wasn’t always successful, and I spent a lot of time cursing the grade school teachers who would have never passed a student along if their reading skills were as poor as this student’s math skills were.

Yesterday, I attended a training for the Lindamood Bell math program, On Cloud Nine. Their claim is that many math students who are unsuccessful have no ability to visualize numbers, no internal picture of numbers or the number line.  I wasn’t as excited about the program as I was with the reading program whose training I attended last week.  But I was intrigued by the idea that an internal number line is ground zero.

Back to my rant…

There were ten teachers at the training, all of whom worked in elementary schools.  And without exception, I think they needed the intervention themselves.  It’s not that they couldn’t do basic arithmetic.  They could.  It’s just that they didn’t understand it well enough to teach it.  They knew the rules, but not a whole lot else.  The woman sitting next to me was practically in tears trying to follow their place value system.  (I actually thought that the system was the weak link in the curricula so I understood her frustration.  The real problem, though, was that she understood the system she currently uses so poorly that she couldn’t translate it to this system.)

The program may be called On Cloud Nine, but unless we have better trained teachers, math education will continue at rock bottom.