I've been considering starting a blog about my substitute teaching experiences for some time now, but something happened in my classroom today that gave me the final push I needed to actually sit down and start writing. I was giving a high school geometry class their final today, and a student called me over and asked how to find the area of a rectangle. I was absolutely shocked. How can someone possibly make it through a GEOMETRY class without ever learning the formula for the area of a rectangle? As it turns out, his teacher taught him to rely on his "formula sheet" all year, and that particular formula was not on the formula sheet attached to the final. So that poor student, assuming he did well enough on his final to pass the class, will move on to algebra 2 next year without knowing the area of a rectangle. And goodness knows how many other gaps there are in his knowledge of math.
Scenarios like this one are simply not acceptable. By failing to adequately prepare students, teachers are setting them up for failure. By 2020, only an estimated 50 million Americans will be qualified to fill 123 million highly skilled, highly paid jobs, according to the recent documentary "Waiting for Superman."
It's time to change students' perceptions of math as the stereotypical least-favorite subject, and encourage them to think of it as a big, fun puzzle that they get to work out. So won't you join me in celebrating the wonderfulness of math? Then share it with your children, students, parents, colleagues, friends, and anyone else that cares to listen? It's time to get everyone excited about math so that students can start enjoying and excelling in the subject that could be the key to their success in the future!
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