How did you like 2021’s experimental school year?
Get ready for more in 2022.
Improvising is what we Americans do when we’re in trouble, and so the pandemic has spawned many new approaches in education. Innovation, like exercise, can be messy and frustrating — but can sometimes make us better, too. Consider, for instance, one intriguing, and blessedly simple, new experiment in math.
Algebra and geometry, two high school courses most of us have taken, have been taught in that order since they were installed by U.S. colleges two centuries ago and by U.S. high schools one century ago. But now, some schools have boldly reversed the sequence: geometry first, then algebra. It’s the type of pandemic-era idea that’s relatively inexpensive and, no less important, unlikely to incite fistfights at school board meetings.
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The parental anger over school controversies that led to political reverses last year will discourage elected bodies from trying big reforms anytime soon. The movement to reduce math tracking so slower students could catch up, for example, was a big topic a year ago. Now it’s getting less attention.
Small steps have their advantages. Jeff Gilbert is principal of a school I attended long ago, Hillsdale High in San Mateo, Calif. Putting geometry before algebra now made sense to Gilbert and his staff, he said, because “we knew that we would have to adjust our curriculum anyway given the loss of learning over the last two years.”
Nearly every Hillsdale ninth-grader this year is in geometry. Some already took algebra in middle school; others have not taken it yet. Since geometry’s focus on properties of space is different from algebra’s study of symbols and their use, the Hillsdale faculty — veteran innovators — decided to make geometry a gathering place for freshmen. The school can then assess each student’s progress to help them choose what to take in math the rest of high school.
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Teachers at Hillsdale and elsewhere, Gilbert said, have long worried about sticking kids into the century-old American high school math sequence that has few options. “This allows us to coach students appropriately going out of ninth grade,” he said. “If they are ready for Algebra 2, they are on the path to AP Calculus or AP Statistics. We also have a pretty extensive acceleration program that will roll out second semester for students who are not yet ready for Algebra 2 but could be.”
Another jurisdiction putting geometry before algebra is the state of Alabama. The fifth-poorest state in the nation, it’s a very different environment than Hillsdale High, surrounded by Silicon Valley affluence.
Share this articleShareAlabama announced its own experiment before the pandemic, three years ago, seeing the change as part of a series of steps to raise its miserable math scores.
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“One of the troubles that teachers have bemoaned is that we teach Algebra 1, then we interrupt it for a year with Geometry, then we come back and teach Algebra 2,” Eric G. Mackey, Alabama state superintendent of education, said then. Teachers “did not want to interrupt the algebra sequence for those students that are not the math highfliers.”
Some experts doubt this tweak will work. Husband and wife Jason and Sandy Roberts created an accelerated program in Pasadena, Calif., that has middle-schoolers taking calculus. Jason Roberts doesn’t like putting geometry after Algebra 1 because students will forget important concepts before they get to Algebra 2 — but he also rejects teaching geometry first, because that limits the kind of geometry problems students can solve. The Robertses prefer integrating the two, as some schools like theirs have done.
But Trena Wilkerson, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, says she likes the sequence shift. “Starting off students with geometry and then moving into an algebra sequence, with opportunities to learn and apply statistics and data science — while different — may provide more students access to rigorous and engaging mathematics and the opportunities this affords them in school and beyond,” she said.
Or it may not. One of the reasons we are seeing so many schools do things differently is they have to display a determination to recover from achievement declines, even if they are not sure how to.
As a new year starts, experiments such as these can encourage fresh thinking.
Pleasant surprises may follow.
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