Green Lake 2011: Phillip Cox – Increase Student Mathematical Performance, Watch Your Language and Memorize Less
Phillip says we are going to talk about some good stuff, but not fancy stuff. He has learned that how we say things (maybe by avoiding mathematical language) is of great importance. Can you go a whole year without saying FOIL (barf) or cancel? Secondly, Phillip believes that we have students memorize too much.
Phillips main points:
- Students need to be more mathematically literate.
- Teachers must be more mathematically literate.
- Being a good math student does not necessarily make you a good math teacher.
- We need to get the kids to think “Have I seen this before, or is it just new vocabulary.”
- Telling kids we are “going to step it up a notch”, or “this is tricky” just gives them an excuse not to do it since it’s hard
Phillip talked a lot about really trimming down what we require students to memorize. Can we do geometry with only 2 memorized formulas? Distance formula is just Pythagorean Theorem right? He also talked about making relationships between vocabulary in English and vocabulary in Mathematics. The dictionary definition of acute is “sharp” and the definition of obtuse is “blunt”. How can you use that to talk about acute and obtuse angles? Like Dan Meyer says, “the math must serve the conversation”. We need to make sure to motivate a need for the tools. For example, naming of polygons. We should motivate the need for naming it. Possibly asking students why we name stuff.
The same ideas in our math classes should be coming up over and over again. When students view everything as a new topic they are understandably confused and overwhelmed. We want our students to be “lazy” in the sense that they should constantly be thinking about how what we are doing is the same thing we have already done. Students need to be able to reconstruct what we do so they are independent. Good students are able to figure out what to do when they don’t know what to do.
