11 Recommendations to Middle-ish Grades Math Teachers

Maybe some of these are "radical" and "offensive", or maybe they're not. I'm just throwing them out there. Please don't hate me if you do some of these (I know a couple of them are quite commonly done by many math teachers). These are just my personal opinions, but I feel quite strongly about them. I figured I'd say it here, because some of these things drive me nuts, and I need an outlet.

11. Do not tell a kid to "move things across the equal sign and just change the signs". Preferably you don't ever say this phrase to a kid ever, but if a kid comes to you and says that someone else somewhere (ie. a parent or another teacher) has taught that to them, you need to drill into them the reason why this shortcut works. Grill them until they can articulate why the term necessarily shows up on the other side with the opposite sign.

Reason: If you teach shortcuts like this without the correct foundation of understanding, then down the road the kid cannot approach a complex situation intuitively, because they cannot visualize the equation as a balance.

10. Do not allow your students to do simple equations only in their heads / showing little or no work at the early stages.

Reason: Even if the kid is bright and they can do the equation correctly every time, you are helping them to develop a bad habit that is hard to break. Down the road, when the equations get more complicated and the kid starts to make procedural mistakes, they'll have such a hard time finding their mistakes because they've habitually skipped so many steps.

9. Do not allow your students to "open parentheses" without knowing why they do this and where it is the most useful.

Reason: Normally, it just irks me to see kids do 2(3 - 5 + 1) = 6 - 10 + 2 = -2 instead of following PEMDAS to do 2(3 - 5 + 1) = 2(-1) = -2, but it's really feckin' scary when I see students do
2 (4·5 + 7) = 8 + 10 + 14 = 32 in their second year of algebra. When all the values are known, they don't need to be distributing!!

8. Do not introduce integer operations without explaining the meaning of addition and subtraction of signed numbers! You can use number lines or you can use the idea of counting and neutralizing terms, but in the end, the kids need a framework of understanding.

Reason: I recently tutored a kid on a one-time basis (I was doing a favor for her parent, who's my friend, even though the kid doesn't go to our school), and the kid only knows memorized rules (she rattled them off like a poem), with no conceptual understanding whatsoever when I probed further. Unfortunately, that kind of problem is not really fixable in a day. It can take a teacher weeks to instill the correct habit of thinking. If you teach a kid to memorize a rule for adding or subtracting integers without understanding, then I can almost guarantee you that after the summer they won't remember it. And, if you first teach the rules by memorization, even if you try to explain afterwards the conceptual reasons for the rules, there ain't no one listening.

7. Do not teach "rise over run".

Reason: In my experience, a majority of the concrete-thinking kids out there do not know what the slope means. When you ask them, they just enthusiastically say "rise over run", but they cannot identify it in a table, they cannot find it in a word problem, they certainly cannot say that it's change of y over change of x, and half of them cannot even see it in a graph.

You have other alternatives. I teach slope as "what happens (with the quantity we care about), over how long it takes." For example, the speed of a car is "miles, per hour"; the rate of growth of a plant is "inches, per number of days"; the rate of decrease of savings can be "dollars, per number of weeks". You have alternatives to "rise over run". Learn to teach kids to visualize the coordinate plane as a sort of timeline, where the y-axis describes the interesting values we are observing, and x-axis describes the stages at which those values occur. Once they understand this, then they can correctly pick out the slope given any representation of the function.

6. Do not let any kid in your class get away with saying "A linear function is something that is
y = mx + b."

Reason: Again, in my experience, I can habitually meet a full class of kids who had spent a good part of a previous year learning about lines and linear equations and linear operations, and in the following year when they move to my class and I ask them to tell me simply what is a linear function, the only thing they can say is: Y = mx + b. That is really, really bad. The first thing they should be able to say is that it is a straight line, or that it is a pattern with a constant rate.

Please, please, do teach lines in context. Make sure that kids know what y, m, x, and b all mean in a simple linear situation.

5. Do not introduce sine, cosine, and tangent without explaining their relationship to similar triangles.

Reason: The concept is too abstract, too much of a jump from anything else the kids have done. Give the kids some shadow problems to allow them to see what the ancient mathematicians saw, and why they recorded trigonometric ratios in a chart. Let the 3 ratios arise as an outcome of a natural discovery, a natural need. And then, when you introduce the terms sine, cosine, and tangent, the kids will at least already understand them as sweet nicknames for comparisons between sides.

From then on, whenever you say sin(x) = 0.1283... , remind kids what that means simply by immediately saying, "So the opposite side is about 12.8% as long as the hypotenuse." If you do this consistently, kids will never grow afraid of those ratios.

4. Do not teach right-triangle trigonometry from inside the classroom!

Reason: Kids need to be able to visualize geometry relationships, especially in word problems. Some kids have trouble doing this on a flat sheet of paper. Don't disadvantage those learners. Take them outside, make them build an inclinometer, make them experience angles of elevation, angles of depression, and the idea of measuring heights through triangular ratios. This really only takes a day, or at most two. In the end, when you take them back to the classroom, you will be amazed at how well they can now visualize even complicated word problems involving multiple right triangles.

3. Do distinguish between conceptual and procedural errors. Your modes of intervention should look very different for those two types of mistakes, and what you communicate to the kids as recommended "next steps" should look fairly different as well.

2. Do incorporate writing into your classroom. Writing is an extremely valuable way of learning mathematics. Every project should have a significant writing component. When kids write, they are forced to engage with the subject on a personal level, and so they learn much more.

1. Do make learning fun. From a biological perspective (of primitive survival), our brain makes us remember things permanently when our emotions are triggered. Fun learning isn't a waste of time. It's necessary to help the students build long-term memory!