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
Which One Doesn’t Belong? (WODB) is a website with a very simple concept. It is “dedicated to providing thought-provoking puzzles for math teachers and students alike”. Basically, it presents four of something and you have to come up with a reason why each one of the four things doesn’t belong. But it is far more than a collection of brain teasers.
One way we can help students develop different ways of thinking in math is to have them work on activities where they have to classify mathematical objects. Continue reading Learning through classification: What makes this number (or shape or graph) different from the others?
As adult education instructors, we know that our students bring all kinds of preconceived ideas about math into the classroom. Many see math as boring—a subject governed by processes, rules, and formulas that has little connection to their world. Furthermore, because they may have struggled with math in the past, they think that they will never be good at math. “I’m just not a math person.” We’ve all heard that from our students. Continue reading Problem-Solving Activities, Videos, and Articles Promoting Growth Mindset