The Mathematical Practices that are in the College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education define what it means to be a mathematically proficient student. As adult education instructors, our job is to help our students navigate over the swells in the tempest of their angst until they get to the point where they have enough confidence in their own abilities to weather the sea of mathematics.
Continue reading Hundreds of Challenging Math Problems Worth Solving
One of the most common questions we hear from math teachers is “Where can I find good problems for my students?”. There are more than a dozen sites reviewed on CollectEdNY that answer that question but we are really excited to share MathMemos which, like CollectEdNY, is entirely focused on adult education math teachers and students. Continue reading Bring Math and Student Thinking Alive in the Adult Ed Classroom
“About 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. lacks the math competence expected of a middle-schooler, meaning they have trouble with those ordinary tasks [calculating a tip, doing fractions to double a recipe, know how much change to expect from a cashier] and aren’t qualified for many of today’s jobs.”
I came across this quote in an article called “Early Number Sense Plays a Role in Later Math Skills“. The author attempts to trace this statistic back to a root cause and comes up with a University of Missouri study done with 7th graders who were given a test to assess a variety of math skills needed to function in the world as an adult. They found that the students who were behind on the seventh-grade test were the same students who had the least number sense or fluency in mathematics in the first grade.
Continue reading Number Sense: Helping Adult Numeracy Students Close the Gap
Years ago, when beginning some work on percentage with some HSE students (they were called GED students at the time), I posed the following problem:
Veronica’s math class has 25 students. If 7 of them identify as men, what percent of the class does not identify as men?
I used it as a quick assessment to see what kind of understanding I could build off and what kind of misconceptions I could draw out. Continue reading Mistakes in Math: Expected, Respected and Inspected
My Favorite No is a great assessment activity that turns students’ mistakes into collective opportunities for learning. It can be done with any math topic or content. It takes very little time, so teachers can do it often and weave it into the daily routine of their class. I learned about it from a middle school teacher named Leah Alcala through a video created for the Teaching Channel. Continue reading My Favorite No: A Great Way to Celebrate Student Mistakes in Math