Are you sick of reading about our troubled schools? I often wish
there was nothing wrong with our schools, but that is not the case.
Last year, the Alliance for Academic Excellence (a local grassroots
group dedicated to improving our local public schools) focused on
the English Department at Gilroy High School. This became a
year-long project.
Are you sick of reading about our troubled schools? I often wish there was nothing wrong with our schools, but that is not the case. Last year, the Alliance for Academic Excellence (a local grassroots group dedicated to improving our local public schools) focused on the English Department at Gilroy High School. This became a year-long project.
The Alliance fought for the adoption of a language arts anthology, an improved core reading list, and a summer reading program. All of these have been implemented this year, with varying degrees of success. The textbook is wonderful, the reading list is better than it was in past years, and an actual school-wide summer reading program may be ready by this summer. The English Department is moving forward.
I can pretty much guarantee that math will be this year’s project. I admit that I don’t like math, even though I excelled in math while I was in school. I knew early on that I would not be on a career path that would require any advanced course work in mathematics. For many high school students like my sophomore daughter, math is seen as a necessary evil. She just needs to learn enough to do well on her math SAT. Learning to balance her checkbook will probably be the greatest math challenge she faces in her adult life.
I know that Gilroy students perform terribly in math across the board. There are pockets of bright spots, but on the whole, our kids need help. I believe that our downward spiral in math is a direct result of district initiatives that have now proven to be detrimental to our kids. I have a few suggestions, ones I know the district won’t heed. I have helped my three kids with their math homework for nearly 10 years. I know what worked for them.
In first and second grade, children should do math for at least one half hour, preferably in the morning. Beth Newick taught two of my children in second grade. She did a “mad minute” math sheet every day. Her second-grade class excelled in math. Of course, this was three or four years ago, when second graders stayed with one teacher for the whole day and language arts didn’t take up two thirds of the school day. Maybe we should revisit the idea of a primary teacher being responsible for a group of kids who stay in one class all day long. That schedule worked well for every educated person I know.
In third grade, Janice Krahenbuhl was the queen of the five-minute timed test. She started with addition. You have five minutes to correctly complete 100 simple addition problems. When you have successfully completed addition, you move on to subtraction, then multiplication, then division. Every child who leaves Room 7 at Rucker School has passed all four of the five-minute timed tests by the end of third grade.
The math teachers at Brownell Middle School give a little bit of homework every night.
If your kids do the homework, they will succeed, and be prepared to go on. Toby Brown and Val Kelley, who taught at Brownell and now teach at Solarsano, were the best math teachers my oldest daughter ever had. She was singing about the quadratic equation, and she learned Algebra. So did the rest of her classmates; two years ago 75 percent of Brownell eighth graders scored proficient or above on the STAR test.
We currently have middle school students taking three or more periods of language arts. When half the day is language-focused, we lose the ability to teach the basics in math and science. Our district has toyed with MARS and adopted some practices of the Noyce Foundation. We MAP test in math, and we now try to teach the standards.
At the end of the day, none of these practices are more effective than a good teacher who does whatever it takes to get the students to understand the basics.
One good year of math lays the foundation for success the following year. One year of poor math instruction can be perilous, not because the student can never catch up, but because the catch up time doesn’t fit into the school day we have designed for our students.
It is time we look at the school day and design a program that will enable our teachers to teach and allocates the time necessary for our students to learn.
