Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for January 15, 2008 MONKEYING AROUND WITH ALGEBRA

What-ev-uh!

File this article and the name Scott Pellerin away in your memory banks.

Wanna bet you'll read more about this later?

A major sex scandal in the Rhode Island public schools...involving teacher and/or students...and a "ridiculous 5-foot blowup monkey"?!

Steiny: Students + blowup monkey + word wall = … algebra?

By Julie Steiny

At the beginning of his ninth-grade algebra class at Mt. Hope High School in Bristol/Warren, Scott Pellerin gestures emphatically with one hand, while in the other he holds a ridiculous 5-foot blowup monkey. While he reviews what they’ve been learning so far, the slumped, blasé teens seem amused by the high-energy Pellerin.

Earlier in the week, students stood in lines — first with 2 kids, then 4, 6, 8 and finally 12 kids — and used stopwatches to time how long it took each line to hand the monkey down from one end to the other. Today they will learn the math that allows them to use data to make predications — in this case how long it will take for the whole class, 22 students, to pass the monkey.

The state’s new diploma system is inspiring much change at Mt. Hope High School, including aspects of teaching itself. The new system asks that students pass their courses and tests, per usual, but most importantly, it also requires them to demonstrate that they can apply their knowledge and skills to real-world problems. Great grades and test scores are fairly useless if the kid can’t actually do anything with his information and skills, once she’s out in the field.

But schools can’t just toss kids into real-world projects on a sink-or-swim basis. Teachers must prepare students to be successful at such projects. OK, how?

Pellerin shows his students how to draw a graph with an x-axis for the seconds of time and a y-axis for the number of students involved in passing the monkey. Flamboyantly, he announces he has a roller coaster in his backyard at home, which has provided him with data about how much time it takes (“x”) for various numbers of people (“y”) to wait in line to get on a roller coaster. With his made-up data, Pellerin shows how to make a scatter plot on a graph. Then he shows how to draw a best-guess straight line through the cluster of “nonlinear,” scattered dots of data. And finally, he extends the straight line to show how much time he’d predict the wait would be if yet more people cued up for the ride.

He says, “This is how I can predict what might come next. So this extension is not real data, but predicted data.”

Up to this point Pellerin has been teaching a pretty standard algebra lesson. But the other adult in the room, who has been heretofore silent, adds “nonlinear” and “constant” to a word wall that already includes “intersect,” “quadrant” and “coordinate.” A word wall? Word walls are a mainly a literacy technique. As it turns out, Nancy Lavey is a literacy specialist. In an algebra class. Oka-ay.

As the kids start to plot their data and formulate predictions, Lavey implores them to “Think like mathematicians. Observe. Observe like mathematicians.”

While students work, Lavey tells me. “Teacher discourse is academic, but the kids speak playground language. You hear all the time “the thing” and “that number.” What they mean is the coordinate, the data on the x-axis, the constant. They need the content vernacular, which is the vocabulary of the teacher. How does a historian read a primary source document? If you’re thinking critically, how are you using language as a historian would use it? How if you’re a mathematician?”

Mt. Hope High has never had a literacy coach before. Her job is to help teachers capture the vocabulary that governs their content area so they become more aware of having the kids use it. Pellerin nods sagely as she says, “By helping Scott to use language and literacy strategies, the students learn to speak, think, write and read as mathematicians. To apply their skills, kids have to think like mathematicians.”

Teaching kids to apply skills is teaching them to think. This is different from amassing content knowledge and spitting it back on tests and assignments.

All of Rhode Island’s high schools have been charged with teaching kids how to apply their skills. Each school is approaching the challenge slightly differently. Mt. Hope is further along with making changes than most.

Nebraska is the only other state that is also building applied learning requirements into their diploma system. Twenty-six states award diplomas only to students who’ve passed their state tests. This “high-stakes” testing is convenient, but the unintended consequence has been to push more kids to drop out and to do so earlier. If America’s education system remains hyper-driven by tests, teachers might as well teach to tests that push instruction to become more hands-on, more real-world-based, and much more relevant to the actual futures kids are about to encounter. Higher ed and employers both work better with kids who speak in terms of “prediction” than those still talking about “the thing.”

OK, the kids have made their predictions by extending the line on their scatter plots. They explain why they predicted what. Some predictions account for the possibility that 22 kids are more likely to drop the monkey, which had happened earlier.

Finally, with an eruption of giggles and jostling, they all line up and get ready to test their predictions. Pellerin says, “Go,” and the monkey passes from one end to the other, without dropping, in 9.4 seconds.

Pellerin says, “How many underestimated the time?” The kids faces are blank. Lavey says, “How many predicted less time than their guess?” A few hands go up.

Simultaneously, both teachers shout, “Underestimate.” They say it again as Lavey heads for the word wall. Pellerin elaborates the definition of the word for the students.

So the adults at Mt. Hope are learning about applied learning right along with the kids. Learning together is how school should be.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises.