By Sara Finegan

         If we knew as much about math disabilities as we do about reading disabilities, we’d be in far better shape in this country. Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand educators and researchers have been exploring all aspects of difficulty with numbers for a long time. I don’t notice a whole lot of interest among American researchers, and as a result, we are unfocused and less-than experts when it comes to math instruction in the special ed classroom.

          I’m the first to admit that I don’t know a lot, and that I am slow to educate myself. This is probably because I wasn’t much good with math myself as a student, and I still have the residue of my frustration and insecurity flowing through my veins.

         Still, I’ve come to actually like teaching math, and have lately been having more success than failure in developing strategies that work in my classroom. In my school district, kids take benchmark assessments every 6-8 weeks in math to ascertain their progress and status with regard to the standards.

         For the first time last year, most of my students scored at Basic level or above after the first math benchmark exam.  We also made our way all the way through the fourth and fifth grade math standards – in our own time, and in our own way.  This year, 12 of 14 of my students are in general education math at their own grade level.  I’m not sure yet how well it’s working, but at least we’re giving it a try.

My two mentors. 

         I owe pretty much everything about my approach to math to two skilled colleagues. 

          Greg Roy, the sixth grade teacher at the elementary school that has been my home away from home for the last five years, introduced me to “friendly numbers” and “decomposing big numbers” and base tens. Leading our staff development in math, he taught me how to think about numbers and operations in a new way.

          He continues to give me simple explanations for concepts that seem too complicated for me to teach. And he trusts me enough now to have handed over half of the sixth grade general education class to me for math this year.

         Leatrice Roberts was for many years a District Math Resource Teacher in San Diego Unified School District until budget cuts eliminated her position. She’s now in her own classroom and doesn’t have as much time to help guide my thinking about math, but I can always reach her by email. And before the financial meltdown forced our district to wipe out the entire math department, she spent hours in my classroom learning about learning disabilities and brainstorming with me about ways to teach new concepts and skills.

         If not for Leatrice, I would not have overcome my fear of teaching kids about decimals: she walked in and did a one-hour lesson that opened up all of the doors for us and jump-started a comprehensive unit in which the kids became inspired by math.

Just another brick in the wall.

         I envision (and I’m sure this is not an original train of thought here) math as a long brick wall. (when I was in school, I think I bruised my head on it more times than not). Each brick is an important skill. The more loose or missing bricks we have, the more unsteady the wall. Most students in Special Day Classes are missing a lot of bricks, and the ones that are in place are precarious, at best.

 So what are these bricks?

         The bottom row is all about math facts.

• Knowing what makes ten and what ten minus any number is.
• Knowing what makes twenty and what twenty minus any number is.
• Knowing what makes one hundred.
• Multiplication facts.

         Math facts fit into an area of math reasoning called numeracy, which has to do with understanding the value , use, and place of numbers.

         Low numeracy is a highly-prevalent math disability that is pretty much unspoken in the U.S. In England, they know all about it and are developing ways to help kids and adults with coping strategies.

         We don’t really know why so many people don’t grasp the basic math facts. And it really doesn’t matter why, now, does it? What’s important is how we teach those facts or, if a student cannot internalize them, what strategies we can teach him or her to use to move on: what mortar, so to speak can we use to strengthen this level of the math wall?

         Another row of the brick wall has to be the language of math. There’s a whole vocabulary of math that one must know in order to be able to do things like set up a numerical equation from a word problem, or just figure out what a word problem is asking.

         This vocabulary is part of math reasoning, and you can bet that math reasoning is yet another skill set that is tenuous, at best, in kids with learning disabilities.  I’m just starting to explore the language of math. Well, not the language itself, but how to blend it into my instruction and get my students to embed it in their skill sets.

         Part of the reason that understanding the language of math is important is that it helps us to visualize what’s going on in a problem and grasp what the question is all about. Consider this word problem:

Ms. Finegan bought 92 Halloween pencils – the kind with sparkly purple and orange ghosts on them, and erasers in the shape of skulls. She wants to share them equally with her 18 students. How many will each student receive?

         If you don’t know that the words “share equally” mean that each student is going to get the same number of pencils, you aren’t going to be able to draw a picture or diagram of the problem, which I think is really important, though not crucial, to developing math reasoning.

         And if you don’t know that “share equally” implies division, you, like most of my students last year, you aren’t going to have the foggiest idea how to proceed with this problem whether you can draw or not.

         So many of our students not only don’t know the basic math vocabulary but have receptive and/or expressive language disorders that sometimes math instruction seems incredibly daunting. It’s much easier to throw a worksheet in front of students and teach them the rote solving strategies we learned growing up than it is to force the language through the lesson, to talk and talk, and model, model, model. But it’s that talking and talking that is going to develop math students.

For my next few posts about math instruction, I’m going to focus on these basic numeracy skills. We’ll move on to higher-level reasoning later in the year.

demanding classroom · high expectations · learning disabled · low numeracy · math disabilities · math language · number sense · rigor · rigorous instruction · special education · standards

1 comment

<< Language in the Classroom

Beginning At the End: Backwards Planning >>