Exploring The Differences

As I continue to work through this fall semester both in my graduate studies and in my substituting experiences in a variety of classrooms and subjects, now more than ever I feel I'm both exploring and experience the differences of our schools and students. I feel the frustrations of my students when they're subjected to note taking and textbook drill. What once fell deaf to my ears is now being hear loud and clear - our students want to be challenged, they are bored with the daily routines of pencils and paper practice. The idleness I see all around me resonates so much more now, for I am finally feeling, through our class discussions and Boaler's words, the effects of such a stagnant method of teaching and learning smothering our schools. If we really listened to our students we'd find many of the solutions to classroom management, to a lack of student engagement, and to the stress we put on all our students in over testing. By incorporating their voices, their thoughts, we can put into practice a way of doing, a means of learning as Phoenix Park has accomplished.

"The Amber Hill students believed the mathematics they encountered in school and the mathematics they met in the real world to be completely and inherently different" (p. 111). What are we doing in our classrooms to bridge this gap? Are our practices and teaching styles making the learning relevant outside our class and into the everyday lives these students live? How sad it is that our education system demands are not being linked by our students in similarities to the real world. The math is not "totally different". The methods used can be the same! Our math classrooms can be social! And most important, our classrooms should provide opportunities for students to work it out for themselves, instead of relying solely on textbooks to provide algorithm after algorithm in how to "solve" the problems. There is a need on us now, like never before, as teachers to ensure perceptions of the environments created by the real world and the mathematics classroom are no longer inherently different, but rather, the same.

Although there are many, a particular idea Boaler raises from Lave (1996a) is that "notions of knowing should be replaced with notions of doing, arguing that the only indication that someone has knowledge is that they can use it" (p.117). This relational view is the essence of what Phoenix Park's approach to learning and teaching mathematics is all about. Like Paul and others at PP, our students too will support this logic and will fulfill it. Transmitting knowledge has been tried. It hasn't work. Why don't we try something different? That is, why don't we try holsitic means of thinking and doing with our students. Let's desconstuct the boundaries around school mathematics that currently exist, that currently cripple so many of our youth. It can be done.

One small step for math, one giant step for math minds.