Remember elementary school math? How you slogged through the times table, struggled with story problems and generally dreaded the whole thing? Some very smart people, people who went on to use math in their professional lives, remembered that experience and asked themselves: “Why shouldn’t kids love math?” The answer was MathAmigos, one of Opportunity Santa Fe’s collaborative working groups.
The founders and partners of MathAmigos understood what my elementary school teachers didn’t know: that math can be fun, interesting and exciting. But, how do you fix the problem of making math classes engaging for kids so they move to mastery? Their answer was to create regular workshops for Santa Fe Public School teachers and pay stipends to those who participate. The workshops are giving public school elementary teachers strategies for teaching math to their students in new and creative ways, such as Cuisenaire Rods, Exploding Dots, Math Circles, Math Circles in Spanish, Literacy and Math, Stories with Math — and the list keeps growing with each teacher workshop.
Travel back in time and imagine taking a class in Exploding Dots instead of facing an endless slog of multiplication and division problems. Consider the prospect of an hour spent working with Cuisenaire Rods as a way of learning addition and subtraction. The teachers learning these innovative techniques can’t get enough of it, and neither can their students. Kudos from workshop participants tumble in one after another:
“It makes math fun!”
“More excited! [My students] are more motivated.”
“Students are more engaged and persistent. They have requested an afterschool math club!”
“Students are more open to experimenting/learning new concepts. Students are more confident knowing that they can use multiple strategies to solve a problem.”
“Their creativity increases enthusiasm. Thank you!”
MathAmigos published their first resource booklet for elementary school teachers, “FUN Math Activities Grades K-5,” in the spring of 2019. Their second booklet, “Stories with Math Grades 1-6,” published last month, is a compilation of stories created and written by Santa Fe Public School teachers themselves. These stories – both fantastical and down to earth – are not the old story problems about how fast trains are speeding between two cities. These are stories that integrate math with exciting plots relevant to elementary students today. Both booklets are published in English and Spanish, to reach the greatest number of teachers and students.
MathAmigos works closely with the Santa Fe Public School district to ensure their efforts are aligned with the district’s educational goals while at the same time helping the district to stretch its notions of what makes for a good math curriculum.
Most of all, MathAmigos teaches all of us what can happen when people and systems work together to improve their community. This collaborative effort is the essence of Opportunity Santa Fe, an initiative of a dozen working groups all trying as hard as they can to improve the lives and outcomes for Santa Fe’s public school students.
