Suzanne at the Math Forum

When I decided to write an article with the title Unsilence Students’ Voices I thought long and hard about using “Unsilence”! Every time I typed that word the text editor underlined it in red reminding me that it was not a “real” word. Was I rebelling against that red underlining? Maybe! I decided that it expressed what I wanted to communicate and so I went with it. I’ve now had the article published in the journal of the California Mathematics Council, the CMC ComMuniCator:

Unsilence Students’ Voices, September 2012, CMC ComMuniCator

I’ve presented these sessions with the title, Unsilence Students’ Voices:

As you read the ComMuniCator article and/or view the resources linked from the sessions, please comment here. How are you helping your students make their mathematical voices heard?

For as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed having thoughts and tasks and projects overlap and connect. One overlap that happened recently was because of the work Annie and I were doing at Universal Bluford Charter School. The videotapes we made connected with work I was doing to support the Mathlanding project (a grant with Maryland Public Television) and, in turn, connected with having examples of work that we’re doing in classrooms to show to potential publishers of a book we’re drafting about problem solving and communication. Having those connections encourages reflection and deepened purpose. I think one reason I’ve always enjoyed recognizing connections and taking advantage of them is that whatever I’m working on seems to get better each step of the way — it lengthens into a process instead of an isolated event or task.

In 1995 when I first connected to the Math Forum, Steve Weimar introduced me to Connections. It was how we started each morning of the Summer Institute. I had a feeling that there might be residue from one of the institutes and I just found Steve Means description online:

Do you use some idea of Connections in your work? How might a teacher use the idea? How might a school use the idea?

This morning I was again looking through my Philosophy of Education paper and I found two paragraphs that I had written in 1986 as I described thoughts I had had as a conversational English teacher for Berlitz School of Languages:

“At Berlitz we learned that to teach a language you must build a relationship with the student. Somehow that student must want to talk to you. We know how to teach people a minimum of vocabulary, but what is more important is the rapport that you build.”

“Many of my students ask me, ‘When will I be able to really speak English?’ When they ask that question, I know that they are on the wrong track and I try to make them see that they should use learning English as a communicative tool and not for quantifying and marking down how much they know.”

As I reflect on the work I was doing the last two days in a middle school, it starts connecting to what I wrote long ago and have continued to believe is important in teaching. I was a visitor in sixth grade classrooms. I had organized the students into groups of three and after giving them a Problem of the Week (PoW) I asked them to talk about it using as much math vocabulary as possible. The sixth grade teachers I was working with had told me they were finishing a unit on probability and the PoW we had chosen was on that topic. I was encouraging students to use math as a communicative tool and they were able to successfully have conversations with each other about math.

I wonder if the teachers the whole time I was doing this with their students, had in the back of their minds “When will my students really speak Probability?” Were they thinking about quantifying and marking down how much their students know or were they listening to how the students were communicating?

In our climate of testing can teachers ever be a little “out of control” or is it only true that important learning is, must be, and can only be the result and product of teaching. Is what we learn for ourselves trivial?

Last weekend I found myself sorting through some saved papers, books, and magazines and I ran across a paper I had written for a History of Philosophy of Education course that I took as a requirement for my Master’s in Education. Sitting on the floor in our upstairs office I read through the paper and thought, “Wow, I still believe in everything that I wrote even though it was 1989 when I submitted that paper.” Of course, it helps that I wasn’t “young” when I wrote it but was 39 years of age with some classroom experience and my own sons were 10 and 12 years old and so I had had plenty of time to form and also confirm my own personal philosophy. In fact, the title of the paper was “Personal Philosophy Paper.”

Here’s how it started…

“I was a seed. My father thought of me as a lump of clay. The educational system that I work in was formed on the thought that the students are lumps of clay. I work within that system knowing that the students were seeds that have sprouted into a variety of plants. The seed analogy assumes that a unique individual is born into the world to be helped in life in order to grow, learn, and flourish as an individual. The clay analogy assumes that all people are born to be taught and molded into educated adults. I have recognized these two distinct views for a long time but the two analogies are perfect to describe them.”

I thought back to when I had written that paper. I was teaching mathematics at a junior high school in southern California. I remembered thinking that many of my colleagues approached teaching with the thought that a student in their class “didn’t learn” something until they had “taught them.” In contrast, I often wondered if my students had some understanding of a topic before I launched into any section of a unit. What had they already learned about fractions? What conceptual understanding did they have? What misconceptions did they have? What should be the best starting point?

Twenty-two years later … I often find myself working with teachers in their classrooms. Sometimes they don’t start a unit by finding out what their students already know. Is it because they believe that students are “lumps of clay” or is it because they’ve just not developed ideas of how to nurture the seeds of student thinking?