John Walkup

I am becoming more involved in the California Mathematics Council (http://www.cmc-math.org/) and recently presented at both the South and North division conferences.

The South conference was hosted in Palm Springs and I took my daughter with me.  She had been begging to see her favorite metal band Turisas and they were appearing in Pomona, so why not?  They are Finnish and don’t appear in the U.S. very often.  They are also incredible and put together one of the most vivid (and loudest) concerts I have ever witnessed. Another LA-area band called Ironklad was extraordinary as well, and I urge anyone that loves nu-metal (e.g. Disturbed) and lives in Southern California to go see them.

In both Palm Springs and Asilomar, I presented “Avoiding the Most Common Mistakes in Math Instruction,” a compilation of boo-boos that I have witnessed over the years as a professional developer.  Since math is my second main love (behind physics), I especially enjoy presenting this talk, and it was well received.  In summary, here is one portion of the Walk of Shame (I will post more later):

A.  Ineffective questioning strategies — calling on volunteers (raised hands) is a particularly troublesome questioning method that causes much of the discipline problems and mental disengagement taking place inside our classrooms.  With a few exceptions, there is little reason to ask for volunteers to answer a question.  I advocate the following four-step procedure:

1.  Question the entire class (not just a single student)

2.  Wait sufficiently long before choosing students to respond.  (This is where I advocate letting students discuss the answers in pair shares (for DOK-2 questions) or small groups (for DOK-3 and DOK-4 questions).

3.  Sample the class by randomly selecting non-volunteers to answer the question.

4.  Leave No Child Behind–do not simply proceed if the responses indicate students are struggling.

B. Insufficient Concept Development — math teachers often focus too much on procedural knowledge development, which is not only limiting and easily forgotten, it is also a signature of the drill-and-kill method of solving math problems that turns students away from math and science.  (One of my curriculum specialists, Lisa Gibson, wrote an article based on this issue and was recently published by the journal Communicator.)

C. Not Teaching the Importance — too many mathematicians think that students will appreciate the inner beauty of mathematics and love the discipline for its own sake.  As far as students are concerned, Elizabeth Hurley is beautiful, Whittaker functions are not.  My opinion is that if we don’t teach students why the lesson they are learning is important, then why would they want to learn it?  (And no, telling students “You will need to know this on the test” does not count.)

D. Teaching subskills at the expense of grade-level content — yes, students often lack the subskills we think they need to learn grade-level content. However, we can scaffold these subskills while teaching them standards-based content.  For example, when teaching students to calculate powers of integers, I can provide them a multiplication table — the lesson is focused on calculating the powers of integers, not basic arithmetic. Remember, if we have taught students to calculate powers and what the concept “exponential expression” means, they have a chance on the state test; if we have instead focusing on reteaching them basic multiplication, they have no chance at all.

That’s enough for now. If you want the PowerPoint of my presentation, just shoot me a note. And go see Ironklad; they’re great.