Math: Sensible, Useful, and Doable!

“When am I ever going to use this in real life?” “This is too hard!” “This doesn’t make any sense… it’s just a jumble of numbers!” “I don’t know how to do this the right way.” These are typical phrases that math teachers might hear from frustrated and disengaged students. This week in class, we briefly discussed the notion that students need to see math as sensible, useful, and doable. In this blog post, I would like to further reflect on the meaning of these three adjectives.

Sensible

Simply put, math needs to make sense to students. In her video entitled “Brain Crossing,” Jo Boaler discusses how students learn math most powerfully when they both think about numbers as symbols and visualize and draw those numbers as this causes different pathways in the brain to cross and connect. As a teacher, it is important for me to understand how students learn. If I know that students find math to be more sensible when they can visualize the numbers, I need to ensure I am incorporating resources that help students to visualize math (e.g. diagrams, manipulatives, and pictures).

Boaler, Jo. [S Lamb] 2015, August 25. "Day 2 - Brain Crossing" 

Retrieved from https://youtu.be/qZBjub36Bvs

Useful

In order to be engaged and to understand why math matters, students need to see how math connects to their own lives in the real world. As a teacher, I need to ensure I provide students with the opportunity to work with relevant math problems that pertain to the real world. Rather than always give the students questions involving strings of numbers (e.g. “16 x 3 = ?”), I can develop a word problem that is relevant to my students’ lives. For example, I could give the following problem: “Thomas is at the toy store and he wants to buy 16 Pokémon card packs. Each card pack costs $3. How many dollars would Thomas need to have in order to buy 16 card packs?” Thus, as a teacher, it is important for me to create problems and lesson plans that show students how math is useful in their lives.

Doable

It is also critical that students feel that they are capable of doing math. As a teacher, I cannot teach my students one way of doing math and expect them to only ever follow that one method. That is not fair to my students. Rather, I need to respect the fact that there are several different ways of carrying out a math problem and that these alternative algorithms are just as acceptable as the algorithm I personally might choose. This is not something that I personally experienced as a student in elementary school or high school. If I did not know how to do a math problem the way it was taught in class, I felt helpless because I had the mindset that there was only one correct method. Therefore, I understand the need to instill in my students the confidence that there are many different ways of making math doable and that they are not limited to one particular method. One algorithm might make more sense to a particular student or one algorithm might be more helpful for a certain set of numbers. Thus, it is helpful for students to see a variety of methods so they can find the methods that work for them. For example, here are just three examples of different methods we could use to solve an addition equation:

Olij, B. ©2016

Thus, this week’s class has inspired me to facilitate a learning environment where students see math as sensible, useful, and doable!