Teaching Math

When you ask an early childhood teacher why they entered into the profession, the two most common answers are "I love kids" and "I want to teach a child how to read." Personally, I have never met a single teacher who said, "Wow, I can wait to teach a child how to add!" Earlier in my career I would have given the "I love kids" answer. However, as the years progress I find myself getting really excited about teaching math. 

There has been an evolution with teaching where teachers have become comfortable creating rich language arts, science and social studies lessons. When it comes to math, the mentality is to turn to page 348, go through the bold words the textbook company has told you to say, and hope it takes the 60 minutes required to spend teaching the subject. As teachers, we have turned math instruction into isolated skill sets solved through specific rules.

But math is so much more than a set of rules, procedures or memorization of facts before moving on to the next skill. Math is teaching a child how to think. Math is getting stuck half way through a problem, finding a new angle of attack and sticking with it until you know the answer is correct. Math is getting excited because you found a pattern in the clock time or date (my class had a party on 12/12/12 because we figured it was not going to happen until 1/1/2111 or 1/1/2101 which ever way you look at it). Math is critiquing another individual's work, realizing they solved it a completely different way, and yet finished with the same answer as you. Math can be fun!

The new content standards sitting on the laps of teachers has the ability to provide this type of thinking, a mentality that has been missing from the vast majority of elementary classrooms. Once you have come down from the pain of deconstructing these new content standards and realize a lot of content has been stripped away, come find me and I can share so many wonderful ideas which you can incorporate with your students on a daily basis. 

Hopefully, we can change this image of American math education. 

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