Teachers Feel Students’ Pain in Math Seminar

Sitting in a small group, with brightly colored construction paper strewn across the desk, Janet Barlet stared at the task before her. And her mind went blank.

Why can’t you make a Platonic solid using congruent hexagons?

Barlet, a fourth-grade teacher at Berylwood Elementary School in Simi Valley, felt her anxiety level rising. She found herself talking to the other teachers at her table, giggling and generally acting silly.

Then it hit her.

“This is letting us know how our students feel when they’re not getting something,” said Barlet, one of about 60 elementary and middle school teachers from Ventura County who attended a weeklong math workshop earlier this month at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

“We need to feel that discomfort.”

A joint effort by Cal Lutheran and the new Cal State Channel Islands in Camarillo, the program is aimed at improving math education in the elementary and middle school grades by reeducating teachers in focused subjects.

“You hear about math scores being low--this is one way to address that,” said Jackie Gilmore, an education professor at Cal State Channel Islands and co-director of the project.

Unlike many other teacher training programs, in which educators learn new ways to teach basic subjects they already understand, the workshop’s eight-hour sessions covered university-level concepts in geometry that were new to most of the participants.

As such, teachers won’t take everything they learned at the workshop back to their classrooms.

After all, no kindergarten class will be charged with figuring out the volume of a trapezoid.

But the idea, Gilmore said, is that elementary-level teachers can do a better job of teaching the basics if they understand what is required of students in high school and college.

“If that foundation isn’t laid properly, kids can have trouble in math later on,” she said.

Added Cindy Wyels, professor of mathematics at Cal Lutheran and one of the lead teachers at the workshop: “It’s knowing how to do elementary math versus having a deep understanding of why it works and how to teach it effectively.”

On the second day of the workshop, for example, teachers learned about Euler’s formula--a complex mathematical theory that spells out the relationship among the number of corners, edges and faces of three-dimensional figures. But rather than simply memorize the formula, they had to figure out why it makes sense.

“This is definitely mental calisthenics,” said Holly Dye, a fourth-grade teacher at Simi Elementary School in Simi Valley. “It’s very challenging.”

Jennifer Fry, a fifth-grade teacher at Meadows Elementary School in Thousand Oaks, and many other workshop participants said it had been 10 years since their last real math class. But the concepts were so foreign, Fry felt like it had been 30 years.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “The roles are reversed.”

To help teachers grasp the concepts, each day of the program began with a warmup problem-solving activity, usually something hands-on, that tied into a two-hour lecture that afternoon.

On the day that Wyels taught Euler’s formula, the morning consisted of cutting out simple shapes and pasting them together into three-dimensional solids.

Teachers soon learned that they could make solids with squares, triangles and pentagons, but when they got to hexagons, the pieces wouldn’t fit together. Many didn’t understand why until the afternoon lecture, when Wyels explained the mathematical theory behind it: The angles of a Platonic solid must add up to less than 360 degrees. That means six-sided figures won’t work.

“Aha!” the room exclaimed.

After lunch, teachers broke into two groups.

One practiced math software in the computer lab. The other figured out how the day’s lessons could be applied to children in each grade level.

Those teachers worked on word problems that would be suitable for sixth-, seventh-and eight-graders and devised activities that would make sense to kindergartners, such as figuring out volumes by pouring rice into hollow shapes.

While subject-matter workshops for teachers are common in California, officials said the Ventura County project is different for two reasons: the fact that two universities are teaming up, and that university professors--not K-12 teachers--are leading the sessions.

Funded bya three-year grant from the state, the workshop also offered a $100-per-day stipend for teachers who participated. Some also signed up for continuing education credits--needed for teachers to move up the pay scale.

Conejo Valley Unified School District teacher Chris DiPietro said even the first few days of the workshop gave him a deeper grasp of geometric concepts.

“There are a lot of things that teachers just know the answers to because we’ve memorized them,” said DiPietro, who has taught fifth grade for six years.

“This helps me understand the underlying logic behind the answers.”

That understanding is more important since state education guidelines have come to require that tougher geometry concepts be taught in primary grades.

Many teachers with elementary school credentials don’t have the background for that, Wyels said.

That’s where the math workshop comes in.

“The way technology is going now, kids need to be exposed to three-dimensional figures and have an understanding of these things very early on,” said Ivona Grzegorczyk, a mathematics professor at Cal State Channel Islands and the workshop’s other lead teacher.

“It’s not just triangles anymore.”