Getting Schooled in the Wonders of Play :)

"Through play, children learn societal roles, norms, and values and develop physical and cognitive competencies, creativity, self-worth and efficacy. Play has been described as the work of children which helps them develop intrinsic interests, learn how to make decisions, problem-solve, exert self-control, follow rules, regulate emotions, and develop and maintain peer relationships. Risk taking in play helps children test their physical limits, develop their perceptual-motor capacity, and learn to avoid and adjust to dangerous environments and activities." 

(Mariana Brussoni, Ph.D.)

"To provide for and allow children to play rough without injury, teachers need to understand how rough play is different from aggression, as well as about how to offer it in a safe and supportive environment."

(Carlson 2009)

Every school year brings new learnings for me as a principal - I call it 'wonder learning' because I never get to pick the topic!  It seems like each school year brings a whole new set of challenges not encountered before - and this year, a great deal of my new insights have been about play - who knew there was so much to learn!

I confess that play is something I have always pretty much taken for granted - I was pretty good at it as a child (at least as I recall :) and have always loved the various forms of play my children and grandchildren have engaged in over the years - particularly when they invite me to play too! As a teacher, play has been an integral part of learning and I have long been a strong advocate for playgrounds, playing fields, outdoor ice rinks and any sort of gymnasium, climbing walls or other apparatus kids could have a good time with in every community. Growing up in Nova Scotia, there was no shortage of places to play - including a large community playground, ball fields and both an ice rink and curling arena in my small hometown. I cannot recall a time when play wasn't an integral part of my life, nor my children's lives, both inside and outside of home.

As a teacher, I have supervised play, directed play, fundraised for and built playgrounds (7 of them!), planned for and accompanied kids on many kinds of play-related field trip experiences and, on rare occasions, had to interrupt play that simply became too aggressive. I've regulated play and unregulated play and believe in my heart play should not be regulated. Yet it constantly is - don't slide down these hills, don't climb on the playground equipment with your eyes closed, wear a helmet when you ride your bike, for example - for safety.  Which brings us to this school year and how my education has been expanded yet again!

With our focus on Peace Education, our school has a history of very few school ground issues - certainly we are never conflict free as our very human children interact with each other, but the number of physical incidents are usually few and far between since students usually negotiate the school grounds with a high level of success, given the number of 5 - 10 year olds that are gathered in one place all at the same times of the day.  However, this year, it has seemed like there are more instances than usual of physical contact than ever before, sometimes with someone feeling hurt or intimidated, and that has caused us to take a careful look at what is happening - at first, we were worried our school ground was beginning to be a place of negativity and we wondered why - were we somehow promoting an increase in physical contact inadvertently? Did we need more rules around play? Were our expectations of kindness and care suddenly not enough? 

We convened a meeting of teachers and thought we would quickly be able to generate a list of 'don'ts and do's' for students. Within 5 minutes, it became very clear that was not going to happen - and here's why: play is not about rules, it's about learning.  And it looks and sounds differently for every child.  We can't fairly restrict play anymore than we would fairly restrict learning. So we embarked on a learning journey that is still ongoing, and here's what we've discovered so far:

1) There are many kinds of play on school grounds

This is probably not a shock to anyone but it is amazing how many different kinds of play happen over an hour on the school grounds!  Some children are very happy to play on the playground equipment and they work out sharing/taking turns quickly. Others want to quietly engage in imaginative play, inventing games and stories with one or two other like-minded friends that sometimes last several days - or maybe just several minutes! Still others want to be involved in organized games like soccer or capture the flag or tag - an excellent endeavour for sure - but one fraught with different interpretations of "the rules" in the absence of skilled referees.  A few are more interested in active play with trucks or shovels, digging and moving dirt and snow, building roads and 'bases' and forts and such. Others are highly interested in free play - chase and tag games that have few rules and involve running around, sometimes shouting at each other, sometimes playfully pushing or jostling each other in the course of the undefined 'game' - a time of competition and fun in the competition (think 'King of the Castle' type activities).  

2) Rules are not the solution

When we first began our discussions, we sought to curtail some forms of play - outlaw aggressive play, frame the way the students interacted with each other as rules of play - a list of Do's and Don'ts.  The problem is - what kinds of play do you overrule?  Andrew Lawson, one of our teachers, studied Boys' Education as the theme of his Masters degree and shared some huge insights with us - about how important active play - or what is known as rough and tumble play (R & T) - is to the healthy development of some boys and girls (about 60% of them) for learning. This was enormous information for many of us - me included - to digest. Some of the research he shared with us included:

•Scientists have proven that boys’ motivation to move is biologically based. During fetal development the male brain becomes wired for movement by their genes and sex hormones from the very beginning. (Brizendine, 2010)

•Boys have more difficulty listening, get more easily bored with the lack of stimulants while learning, require more space when they learn, and need movement to help stimulate their brains and relieve impulsive behavior. (Gurian, 2011)

•Significant brain development differences in boys and girls include, from birth to age six, girls develop faster with habit learning, language processing, fine motor skills, and social cognition, while boys, on the other hand, develop faster with spatial-visual discrimination, executive planning related to gross motor movement, visual targeting, and accessing stored information. (Hanlon et al.,1999)

We quickly realized we needed to broaden our perspectives on play - if we had a preponderance of children who needed this physical release through play, how could we foster this safely?

3) Children need to take calculated risks for healthy development 

Mrs. Conley & Mrs. Watterson recently attended a Conference on Play featuring Dr. Mariana Brussoni, one of the developers of the website "Outside Play.ca"  https://outsideplay.ca/  

 Dr. Brussoni explains:

"What is risky play?

Outdoor play is a basic childhood need and taking risks is a necessary part of play. Whether jumping in a pile of leaves, climbing a tree, or playing street hockey, children are often happiest when playing. These kinds of experiences are a lot less common for kids today. Our worries and desire to protect our kids can result in setting too many limits on them, which can interfere with healthy development. Risky play can have many different shapes but always involves the thrill and excitement of testing yourself and finding out what happens.  Ways kids can engage in risky play include play with heights, play at high speeds, play with tools, play near elements, play with a chance of getting lost, rough and tumble play.

More and more research is showing that risky play is important for children’s health, development and well-being – kids can build resilience, self-esteem, become more physically active, develop their social skills and self-confidence and learn how to manage risks and keep themselves safe."

There is a fascinating virtual journey on the Outside Play.ca website at https://outsideplay.ca/  that parents and adults can engage in that has us examine our own experiences with play and how they developed, as well as how we can encourage our children's full development through play without incurring unsafe risk. I would encourage every parent to go to this website and take the journey - it is a fascinating process of discovery about ourselves and our children!

4. Healthy play rarely translates into aggressive play as students learn to negotiate and speak up

 One of the most interesting statistics we have encountered so far on our school's learning journey about play relates to how seldom rough and tumble play, when engaged in by children who enjoy this kind of play, translates into aggressive play:

•Play fighting escalates to real fighting less than 1% of the time (Schafer & Smith 1996).

•When R&T play does turn to real fighting, escalation typically occurs when participants include children who have been rejected. (Schafer & Smith 1996; Smith, Smees, & Pellegrini 2004)

•More injury occurs during playground play then R&T play

We are still on a learning journey about play at Eric Harvie School. Our Lunchroom Staff have been working hard to develop some new approaches to the lunch hour organized games, as well as working to recognize what is appropriate play and what is not, as are the teaching staff. We are developing a set of guiding ideas for happy, healthy play that we are going to print on posters around the school and for the website, as well around the school grounds.  From these guidelines, we intend to work with our students to help them understand how to join in play successfully and also to say 'no' successfully when they do not want to play a particular kind of game at all.  Part of successful play is for children to understand what kinds of play exist and what they like to do themselves when they are on the school grounds.

As we learn more, we will share more with our parents and families. For our Parent Information Night in February, Play will figure prominently alongside Literacy and Math - who knew we all had so much to learn about play?!

I want to thank Andrew Lawson for his contributions to this blog, and to Brian Simmons for checking out Dr. Brussoni's website for us and getting our attention around how own experiences and attitudes influence how we perceive play amongst children.  We've been reading many different sources related to the intricacies of play with our 21st century children as well, and hope you will find this topic as interesting and stimulating for prompting conversations as the teachers and staff at EHS have over the past few weeks :)

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal 

Why we don't tell you the level of reading your child is at anymore :)

"It’s hard enough to be a kid. They have lots of things to worry about: parents, friends, sports, grades, etc. Reading can be an escape from those worries, just like it is for adults; it’s a way to relax and plunge yourself into someone else’s world for a little while. But what happens when a child finds out that they’re not reading on the “same level” as the other children? What does that even mean to them? It’s not good, they know that. Reading has now become another worry to add to the pile of worries."  Fountas & Pinnell Blog

Testing is not teaching. 

Why do we teach reading?

To perform on a test?

My goal in teaching reading is always to establish a foundational life skill that will enhance life and learning forever.

Children deserve no less.

Students do not learn to read from teachers' testing their reading so we, as teachers, need to carefully consider how much time we are investing in testing when we could be teaching. What information are we trying to collect from the test that will help the student learn going forward? Is it information that could be collected incidentally as we work with them, or is it information that can only be determined from a test? 

If we treat testing like it is more important than learning, children pick up on that message and do not value the joy of reading as much as their performance on the test. 

Perhaps the greatest challenge has been in broadening our perspectives about what reading actually means. 

Most of us who are already adult, accomplished readers immediately identify knowing letters, sounds and phonics (how we put letters and sounds together to make words) as fundamental to learning to read. We would be partially right - it's pretty hard to read unless you can recognize letters have sounds and that putting letters together makes words that carry meaning.  But reading is so much more than identification of words because reading must include meaning. 

Keeping this understanding of reading as a balance between recognizing letters/sounds/words and making meaning of text is essential to developing readers who are skilled at saying the words as well as making sense of the text. 

When we focus overly on decoding, children understand that is what is the most important skill and they focus their energy on trying to sound out the word, often interrupting their thinking about what came before the word they are struggling with, and then any meaning they might have had is lost. And there are many strategies that support making sense of the letters/sounds/words that do not require actual decoding - partly because the strategy of decoding letters/sounds is only reliable about half the time. However, when students don't know their letters/sounds or how to put them together into words, they rely overly on other clues such as pictures, limited, known sight words, or a 'take a guess' strategies that are unreliable for extracting detail and understanding from the text. 

It is when we approach reading from the perspective of making sense of text using a wide variety of strategies and allow children opportunities to interact with each other and share reading that we foster best environments for growing successful, accomplished young readers.

The history of teaching young children to read is long, varied and controversial - even defining what reading actually is can be controversial and certainly how success in learning to read is measured can spark heated debate amongst educators, parents, researchers and anyone who has ever learned to read!  Studying the history of teaching reading (something I have been doing seriously for the last twenty years!) reveals the impossibility of the task - there are literally hundreds of thousands of research articles, opinion articles and books that have been written and published over the past fifty years alone - all offering advice on the 'best way' to teach a child to read.

The problem is not the research, nor the opinions, nor the personal stories of those who of us who have all experienced the 'learning-to-read' process ourselves.  The problem, as I have come to understand it, is that learning to read is always a highly personalized experience and does not look nor sound like the journey of the person sitting beside you in school or at the hockey game or on the bus. There are similarities for sure, but there are usually more differences in the journey - and therein lies the problem - too much research, opinion, story-telling is focused on trying to generalize what is clearly a non-generalizable, very specific and personalized experience.

Over the years, teachers of young children (and Eric Harvie teaches pretty much only young children as a Kindergarten - Grade 4 institution) have long sought out the 'best' ideas for teaching reading as researchers have tried hard to narrow down and pinpoint the exact best practices. There have been literally academic and societal 'reading wars' over how to think about and teach reading - which speaks to how extraordinarily important learning to read is for both human and vocational success in life. 

This isn't a hit-or-miss endeavour - young children need to get this right, for learning to read is simply the most important and basic academic skill required to advance the quality of life for humanity. There is no 'oh well, try something else' - reading is an 'IT' skill - every child needs to be a good reader to succeed in virtually all areas of our modern life.

My experiences with teaching reading formally spans a 30-year career and 3 academic degrees, as well as over 40 years parenting, and my own experiences of learning to read.  I am passionate about teaching reading - I can't imagine anything else I would rather do, learn about or spend my life doing. And I don't have any answers - can't find them anywhere - that generalize well enough to meet the needs of every child.

This is where the problem of labelling students as readers at a particular level has emerged - the impact of being labelled with a level has ultimately created a much greater detrimental effect on students than the simple act of trying to determine what level of books are appropriate for them to be reading. In fact, there are numerous studies that repeatedly demonstrate telling students what their level of reading is causes them to lose interest in reading, reduce self-confidence, give up trying to learn. 

Perhaps of greater importance is the fact there are no universally determined reading levels that are standardized and applied to the commercially produced reading assessments used so prevalently in schools across North America - reading levels are idiosyncratic to the developers of the particular leveling systems being used and are not generalizable to curriculum or social expectations in geographic areas of the world. They are arbitrary and carry impact for learning only to the extent we allow them to with our students. What has meaning with one type of assessment in one school does not carry the same meaning in another school or with another test. When we put value on the assessment rather than on the learning being accomplished by the child, we are implicitly saying this test is more valuable than this child's learning journey. As teachers and parents we need to be very cautious with this approach - it is not the level that has value, it is the learning that has occurred.

In 2004, when the Fountas & Pinnell Levelled Reading Assessment system was first introduced to me as an Assistant Principal in a K-6 school, it seemed like the most important information for supporting student reading I had encountered in the 15+ years I had been teaching. Finally, there was a way to say 'at/above/below' grade level, a way to identify where the strengths/challenges were and what to teach next that was based on what children were doing rather than a structured basal reading series. It seemed like the 'answer' to the reading assessment questions that had been swirling around for years!

And some of that has held up over the years - it is is still one way to identify the strengths/challenges and what to teach next, but there have been many other strategies developed that are just as useful for identifying these as well.  What has become abundantly clear is that the F & P levels are idiosyncratic to their own assessment system (which is also very costly); they are based on American student research, not Canadian; and the levels do not correspond to the Alberta - or any other - Canadian program of study or curricular expectations.  So when we test a child using the F & P system, identify that child as reading at a particular level and then describe that child as being at/below/above 'grade level' we are actually basing that assessment on data obtained from tests that do not measure what they are supposed to measure according to the Alberta Language Arts Program of Study - in the same ballpark but not the same game. 

And then there are the notably harmful effects of 'leveling' readers as noted above by Fountas & Pinnell themselves - the effects that snuff out the enjoyment and passion for reading, do not acknowledge the personal nature of each person's learning to read experience, limit risk taking with choosing to read unfamiliar texts and cause all of us - teachers, parents and students - to over-rely on the implications of the reading levels rather than truly dig deep with children to build strong, independent, skilled readers who do not care about levels but are enthusiastic readers.

The Fountas & Pinnell Reading Assessment System is, of course, only one example of several 'levelled reading' programs available for purchase and use as reading assessment tools by schools. At EHS, we continue to use the program as part of an overall larger, comprehensive collection of reading assessment strategies, but we no longer share this information with parents as a summative assessment statement - it is, instead, part of our ongoing formative assessment work with students and is used much more judiciously as needed than a few years ago when we arbitrarily used it to test students quite frequently throughout the school year.  

Children who choose books on topics or adventures or relationships they would like to learn more about are interested in the content of the story and use whatever reading strategies they know to make sense of the story structure, vocabulary, events, characters, setting, charts, graphs, maps and other text features. They are making connections, asking questions, predicting, analyzing, inferring, synthesizing and approaching reading as an intrinsically valuable, interesting thing to engage in on multiple levels. 

When we limit a child's reading to books written in a particular set of parameters that limit vocabulary and text complexity to fit within a 'level' we are saying to them that to be fluent and accurate with words is more important than being engaged in the meaning of the text. And this is a dangerously slippery slope if we truly want to develop readers who will read for life as an enjoyable experience as well as a learning experience.

This is not to say that knowing a child's reading 'level' - regardless of the assessment testing system - is not a valuable tool in the teaching toolkit because there is definitely value in this from a teacher's perspective. We need to know a students' accuracy, fluency and approaches to decoding and making sense of text.  We need to know they can track text from left to right, be attentive to punctuation, make sense of unfamiliar words, identify fiction from non-fiction, understand genre, recognize when graphs or charts or captions are used in a text and why.  And a test can quickly allow us to locate the approximate skill level of a student when we need this information. 

Often, so can sitting beside them and listening to them read. Or observing them as they read with a partner. Or self-select a text to read independently from the classroom library. The reality is that children send us bits of information all the time about their reading at school and at home - from recognizing the environmental print of the McDonald's sign at the local mall to reading a headline at the supermarket checkout to noting the ingredients of the recipe for Saturday's dinner to choosing a book independently in the Learning Commons or local library or selecting tonight's read aloud before bed.  

Learning to read is a highly personalized experience and no two children take the identical route at the same time. Learning to read is also a highly social experience of reciprocity - children who share stories and make sense of text together are able to make the most of what the collaborative experience of reading together and sharing ideas, expertise and strategies has to offer. Generalized, communal learning across a classroom or group of students is undoubtedly vital, but there must also be much room for focus and specificity for what each child needs next to continue growing as a reader. 

Testing for reading levels has now taken it's rightful place as one of the tools a teacher may choose to use to inform the next best teaching for a particular child, along with multiple other approaches to understanding those needs as well. What parents and students need to understand is a much bigger picture - the progress a child has made already and what their next steps are in becoming more accomplished as a reader, their level of interest in reading and how they choose texts to interact with, how students approach text for meaning and what strategies they are using to make sense of the text rather than just decoding the words.  

When we don't talk about levels, we talk about the child and how s/he is progressing, what strategies they are using, what the next steps are in developing reading proficiencies (usually an array of letter/sound and text strategies), what their interests in reading are, what they understand about how text is organized and how to make sense of it as they read. This is the important information we need to share about our students, not how they performed on an arbitrary test.

Lorraine Kinsman

Principal

Why Our Kids Need to Honour Remembrance Day...

"Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its' helpless members."  - Pearl S. Buck 

"I try to understand what it is 

that we have gained.

We can be who we are

We can reach for the stars

And be anything...

We can go anywhere we want

Have any friends we want...

These are here for me because of you.

What can I do to say thank you?

I'll remember you."

                                     - Diana Ward 

                                                (Remembrance Day Child)

This week our grade 3/4 students will present a 2018 Remembrance Day Ceremony on November 9th, one of the most powerful moments of the school year for me. 

As a child growing up in Nova Scotia, we held school ceremonies as well, and our family visited the local cenotaph each year for the official Remembrance Day Ceremony too - it is a significant memory for me, with a dad who was in the military.  Those were formative years and instilled in me a sense of gratitude for the sacrifices and losses that ensured I had the good fortune to live in a democratic country where choice was something I could take for granted.

Flash forward many years, five children and six grandchildren later, and the subject of Remembrance Day has come up numerous times across the generations. The concept of soldiers dying to protect our freedom in Canada has lost some of it's potency, buried in the milieu of a world smothered in so many instances of violence for numerous, often unfathomable reasons that's it's hard to imagine a time when things seemed as simple as understanding soldiers died fighting to guarantee we remained a free country. It is actually because we inhabit this world full of complexities that I believe it is essential our kids need to continue to honour Remembrance Day as simply and forthrightly as possible.

While imagining a war fought with very limited technology, in hand-dug trenches, and with weaponry systems that included horses, is the stuff of imaginations today, the freedoms attained through the sacrifices of the men whose reality was exactly that, are very real to the children of today. Freedom to choose their own friends at will,  pursue a career of choice, where they want to live, the music they will listen to, the books they want to read, the clothes they want to wear, to travel anywhere they can imagine, the games they want to play - these are tangible benefits of quality living that would all be in jeopardized without the sacrifices of two wars fought in Europe a century and well over 7 decades ago. Children may not be able to identify fully with the realities of those wars but they are certainly able to understand and appreciate all they have in their everyday lives.

In a world where outward expressions of hatred, violence, intolerance and injustice are becoming more and more mainstream, it is important to take a moment to remember there was a time when the world was fighting against the very social actions that are now championed in many parts of the world. Democracy appears to be changing - rather than a way to embrace acceptance of all, it seems to be now more like a vehicle for erecting boxes of correctness and exclusion; no longer does democracy imply inclusion. This means there is much room for continued fighting - hopefully not in wars, but through actions of peace and acceptance, spread by individuals who understand the value of loving, valuing and appreciating each other because all humans are different, not because we are in some artificial ways, the same.

This is why our children must never forget - in fact, their futures depend on never forgetting - why two great wars were fought, sacrifices were made and the world was changed for the better. Because the work is not complete - as long as humanity survives, there will be work to do to promote acceptance, to foster love and bring humans together in common effort, shared joy and open embrace. 

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Wondering about teaching math, timed tests and why?

"Many parents have asked me:

What is the point of my child explaining their work if they can get the answer wright?

My answer is always the same.

Explaining your work is what, in mathematics, we call reasoning, and reasoning is central to the discipline of mathematics." 

- Jo Boaler  - https://www.youcubed.org/

Dr. Jo Boaler is considered to be one of the premier voices in mathematics teaching and learning and wrote one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time called "Mathematical Mindsets" - among others that I have also enjoyed.  I encourage parents and teachers to go to her website and take a look - there is so much there to challenge thinking about what teaching mathematics is about and how to engage kids in really learning about math rather than just 'doing' math!

This week there was a firestorm of opinion slaking through Alberta over the 'terrible' performance of grade 9 students on the Provincial Achievement Test.  I followed this story with great interest - I have never taught grade 9 Math but, as a grade 5/6 teacher for 20 years, I am very familiar with the concept of 'timed' math tests since they used to be a part of the Grade 6 PAT for several years too. As I listened to the outrage and upset and finger pointing at elementary teachers who apparently 'avoid' teaching children how to count and form numbers - among other things, I have some wonders after listening to a week's worth of upset...

I wonder why a timed test?

In the days when I was a student, and when I was a young teacher, we used to give timed math facts tests to students in elementary school -  for awhile, we called them Mad Minutes after a program that was popular at the time, and we pretty much gave the tests every day to kids.  Each test would be focused on one or two concepts - adding, subtracting, multiplication, division - or a combination of adding/subtracting or multiplication/division - at least, towards the last couple of months of the school year.  Tests would offer fewer questions in the beginning, and would gradually increase in complexity as the year progressed with the idea that students would get faster at answering questions over the course of nine or ten months. Including the at-minimum 5 minutes it would take for kids to set up for the tests (distribute the photocopies and have kids find pencils and erasers), and the 5 - 10 minutes per day we took to check and correct the answers, we would spend approximately 60 - 75 hours each school year trying to get our kids faster at filling in the same facts over and over. 

One thing I noticed over the years was that kids really didn't get much faster if they wanted to be accurate; if they sacrificed accuracy then they were faster but not successful. Once they knew their facts, they knew them - they didn't get faster at recording the answers on paper, probably because recording the answers on paper took the same amount of time regardless of how quickly you knew the answer. And your answers had to be legible so they could be marked. I used to wonder about those timed tests - and how much time was devoted to practicing for one PAT. Was that the most important thing to assess in learning mathematics - how fast they could fill in the blanks? I wondered where the kids would use their quick regurgitation of math facts when they became adults? 

Having learned all my math facts did not make me any less of a mediocre (at best) algebra and trigonometry student in high school and, e other than trying to figure out how much six pairs of socks will cost when shopping, I haven't used my instant recall of math facts too much at all as an adult either. I do use a calculator to add multiple, large numbers - although I am sure I could eventually get the right answer if I tried to add them mentally - it's just that the calculator makes my work faster and more accurate. 

So I wonder about the concept of timed testing - are we finding out what we really want to know about what students understand about math? 

I also wonder about the nature of the timed test - 1.5 minutes per question to complete multiple step/multiple operations questions that include reading - not basic recall of facts at all but applying concepts and strategies in a timed situation - I wonder about that too. 

Kids learn to apply multiple strategies to questions from Kindergarten (first we sort blocks into appropriate groups, then we add them, for example) but we don't give them a time limit because we want to know what they can do, how they reason and make sense of the world through a mathematical lens, not how fast they can think. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, finding square roots and converting to fractions from decimals are all mathematical strategies students learn to do and use - trying to do them all as quickly as possible within one question in a 15 minute time span just may not be a quality indicator of student achievement... 

Several years ago - back in the early 2000's - I had an opportunity to join a very brilliant group of teachers of mathematics to become part of a team that wrote elementary grade level mathematics text books for the "Math Makes Sense" series, an approved Alberta curricular resource. I learned much more than I could ever have contributed to the process for the Grades 3/4/5 text resources, about teaching mathematics but also about understanding what mathematics was all about. What I know is that we have to have a balance in teaching math, just like we have to have a balance between reading and writing when we are teaching literacy. Students need to figure out numbers and then understand they are reliable - 6 is always 6, 6 x 2 is always 12. They also need to know how to use that information in a practical sense and apply it to any and all situations - filling in pages of questions on copied sheets will not make them faster once they know a math fact is always a math fact, and adding up long columns of numbers when you can't really relate to how many 11,654 is, let alone 11,654 + 12,123 will not solve the problem of how many tiles to purchase for a bathroom renovation when you are 35 years old. 

Because, to my way of thinking, this is the crux of the math dilemma - we need to teach kids math so they can carry it with them into real life and make sense of mathematical things - like area and perimeter, interest on mortgages, doubling or halving a recipe, how to order shingles for the roof or calculate your rate of pay for a summer job that needs to cover your university tuition. Some of our kids will definitely become engineers, computer programmers and commodities brokers. Regardless, they will all need to know a number is a number, concrete and useful and easily manipulated to make life more simple and sensible. 

Timed tests? I wonder if they tell us much more than it might be hard to read a bunch of multi-step questions, calculate and record the answers in a very short time frame. I am not convinced they make us faster at recording answers we already know - it takes us the same amount of time to record the answers, even with much practice. 

I understand why the public is upset - on the surface at least, the results don't look so good. But I wonder if it just might be possible the results aren't really showing what we want to know - which is how successfully students can manipulate numbers and ideas to demonstrate understanding of their relationships to each other and other mathematical concepts. 

I also wonder about all the kids who have learned to dislike mathematics and opted out of amazing careers to avoid math altogether...as a mother, I learned the hard way that this is sometimes the way kids feel about math - and I am determined to offer a different way of seeing and thinking about math at EHS. No timed tests but lots of opportunity to cement knowledge of numbers, recall what we know and make sense of how numbers connect to shape and space, known and unknown, parts and wholes. That's the real challenge of mathematics - learning to see numbers as real and useful and fun rather than blanks to fill in on a page.  At least, in my opinion :)

Lorraine Kinsman

Principal