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"I loved math. I loved algebra. I really loved geometry, [but] I hit the wall at pre-cal," said Rocca. "That's the problem," said Whitney, "because you were only given one road to go through mathematics. You got the impression that once you hit the wall, that's it. There's nothing more for you. In fact, math is this extremely, very beautiful landscape. And we're showing people just one road cut right through the center of it." Whitney says our math curriculum is designed for rocket scientists. Literally! Fifty years ago America was in a space race against the Soviet Union, and beefing up on our math program was seen as a winning solution.

Puzzles, books, games and print materials — they make learning math child's play!

In many schools in the United States, students struggling the most in mathematics at the start of high school have the worst odds of getting a qualified teacher in the subject, new research finds. Succeeding in freshman-level mathematics is critical for students to stay on track to high school graduation, with students who make poor grades in math in 8th and 9th grades more likely to leave school entirely.

I have started this blog to document, revisit, and hopefully improve upon many of the approaches that have helped me the most over these years. Some of the postings are “mini-lectures” that most of my tutees have probably heard (cue the eye-rolls). Others are musings about the variations in how math seems to be understood or taught.

Geometry Playground will change the way you think about geometry. This traveling exhibition engages your hands, brain, and body in playful investigations of this most visible branch of math.

In which John explains the education continuum and why math and literature both help us understand the universe in surprisingly similar ways.

Number sense, concepts, and operations word wall The purpose of the mathematics word wall is to identify words and phrases that students need to understand and use so as to make good progress in mathematics. Mathematical language is crucial to children's development of thinking. If students do not have the vocabulary to talk about math concepts and skills, they cannot make progress in understanding these areas of mathematical knowledge. They need to be familiar with mathematical vocabulary and mathematical terms to understand written and spoken instructions. See math word wall resources >

The problem involved mathematical equivalence (i.e., 4+5+7=__+7), which is known to be critical to later algebraic learning. In the speech-only videos, the instructor simply explains the problem. In the other videos, the instructor uses two hand gestures while speaking, using different hands to refer to the two sides of the equation. Students who learned from the gesture videos performed better on a test given immediately afterward than those who learned from the speech-only video. Another test was given 24 hours later, and the gesture students actually showed improvement in their performance while the speech-only students did not.

Did you ever read a book called “The Number Devil”  by Hans Magnus Enzensberger? If you ever see a copy of it, grab it and have a look. In chapter one, Robert, the hero of the story, meets the Number Devil. The Number Devil explains to Robert that knowing a little bit of arithmetic, such as addition and subtraction, is quite useful for when the batteries of your calculator run out but really it has little to do with mathematics. How often do teachers fail to grasp the distinction? How often do we overstate the importance of the “skills” that we fail to recognize the importance of their application? It’s like a football team that focuses so much energy on their training sessions that they forget to turn up to play their game.