Program encourages math teachers, students to think outside the box
Math students urged to think outside the box

By Jeff Raymond

Published: June 29, 2007

WHO ever thought learning math could be this much fun?

Jan Sands' classroom on the otherwise nondescript Southwestern Oklahoma State University math department floor is a buffet for tactile learners.

The colorful clutter is by design: About 70 math teachers from more than 30 districts each summer travel to SWOSU in Weatherford to improve their math skills and find ways to ditch workbooks and teachers' manuals in favor of math-centered crafts and games.

Colored macaroni, strings, watermelons and black-eyed peas all are easy-to-find tools for participants in the K-8 Scholars Appreciating Mathematics program. The program aims to make math less remote and more intuitive, demystifying fractions and taking the pain out of algebra, showing students that math is something to be appreciated and not feared.

"I think the hardest challenge is to get teachers to realize the textbook is a resource only,” said Sands, a "master teacher” who taught for more than 30 years for Putnam City Schools. "There has to be some connection between the concrete and the abstract if (math instruction) is going to work.”

Jenny Anderson, who teaches seventh-grade math at Oklahoma City's Heritage Hall Academy, expects her students to make that connection.

"This gives me something they can see, they can touch and they can actually understand — to move things,” the first-time participant said of teaching algebraic equations.

The program is offered three times every summer — twice in June and once in July — and typically sees more than three applicants for every spot. A $112,916 grant from the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education allows organizers to cover the cost of the eight-day instruction, provide housing and even a stipend at the end.

In the program, normally ego-crushing algebra is reduced to chess pawns and numbered dice on a scale, all of which represent the fluidity of an algebraic equation.

There are "legal” moves for the pawns, just like in chess, and visual confirmation of the solution. A pawn is the variable "X,” and the dice represent the solution.

Other games involve geometry. On Wednesday afternoon, the 27 participants used colored squares to block each other — backgammon-style — on an irregular shape on a sheet of paper. Earlier, they had formed grade-level groups that used stiff paper to make "metric kits” and pyramids that fit inside a cube and coffee cans and tape measures to examine how pi — 3.14, as any child knows — really is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

SWOSU math professor John Woods began a program more than 10 years ago that evolved into the program as a way to change how math is taught.

"Math is supposed to be fun,” he said, but it usually isn't. Teachers teach it wrong, backwards, he explained.

Woods hopes to expand the program, adding sites in other parts of the state. Feedback from teachers is extremely positive, he said, and desire for closer workshops is widespread.

Participants receive 50 hours of professional-development credit and, if they choose, may receive three hours of graduate mathematics credit from SWOSU, tuition-free.

"I wish I could have come years ago,” said 28-year Wynnewood teacher Millie Tuley.