Math and feminism

We learned all about the federal documents that students with disabilities have in "Inclusion" today. This week we'll be seeing a lot of examples of IEPs (Individualized Education Plan) and associated documents. I can't remember its official name but today we went over how students with disabilities begin planning for their futures when they're 14. While Dr. G points out a lot of the faults in the federal and local systems, it seems really well-designed to me. Even as someone of my generation, it occurs to me that at one point, students didn't have this. I think it's really cool that as soon as students are 14, their education can be tailored to the most important skills they need. There are also government programs for kids up to age 22 where they can work in some capacity for a company and receive a stipend. The example Dr. G gave was a greeter at Walmart. It might take a student with disabilities time to learn how to greet people appropriately and the earlier that student identifies a goal, the earlier work can begin on getting there because it will take extra time. It is very individualized, but to me that's the coolest part. These kids can learn real-life skills in school. The goal is always self-sufficiency. So sometimes it's learning how to tie shoes or count change or do dishes or whatever. But I just think it's really amazing that the goal is self-sufficiency and it seems like a really practical approach to get there. If the best they can do is live in a group home, then you shoot for that. If a realistic goal is college, you shoot for that. I really enjoyed the class because it really just made me admire the disabilities programs we have in the US. I know we have a long way to go but they're really pretty sophisticated. Anything we can do to make quality of life better for everyone, including people with disabilities, the less we are going to have to worry about providing other services (ie: for homeless, poverty, ER health care) and the better it makes us as human beings that make up the US, I think.

In "Content Literacy" Matt brought in his 2 yr old boy which was really adorable. We had to cut class short since we were a little limited by the distraction of the very adorable and sometimes crying child. However, it was enough to get the gears of my brain turning a little bit.

We've been reading this book on incorporating math and literacy, which definitely has its challenges. However I've really enjoyed parts of the book that explain how to talk about math problems as a class. There's this theory that kids need to be shown how to think as they read, and the same could go for problem-solving and reading in math. So as a teacher you model your metacognition and think-aloud your strategies as you read. These are things all literate adults do--you just don't realize you do it. Summarize, clarify, connect, predict, question, visualize, infer. I think there are some additional strategies for math reading as well. I'm also really enamored with this idea of teaching kids how to use their textbooks. I didn't know how to use a math textbook until college. I think it will be important to model how I would read a part of a textbook, ie: read-aloud and think-aloud through a paragraph before an example, make some notes while I do it, and show that it is different from English reading. It's dense, it's harder, it takes longer. There are more concepts in a smaller amount of space. There are different expectations. I want to make textbooks less scary. Because math textbooks were always scary to me until recently. That can give kids a lot of confidence. I would also walk through an example and how I would use it, covering up the next steps and trying to guess or predict what the next steps will be. Then I would do the problem before looking at how they do it and check my answer. I would also show how this can be used for homework.

So I think that's really exciting.

I really want to write about something that came up last week and I didn't cover last week. On Wednesday I shared an article with the class. We had this activity called "Journal Club" in "Content Literacy." I think our instructor got the idea from his wife, who is a doctor. She regularly gets together with her team of doctors and they review scholarly articles relevant to their field. So we applied that and we are doing that with education. We had little math groups that we discussed these articles with. So we each brought in 2 articles. I was really excited by my second one, which was about "single-sex" high school girls' math and science classrooms. The study was done in Ontario, Canada based off of research over all of North America pointing to the fact that women are underrepresented in the math and science fields. I never would have really guessed this, but I guess girls' experiences with math and science in high school really can have a profound effect on the rest of their lives and careers. I think the hope is that through studies like this and experiments like this, girls can find more of their niche in the math and science world. The study was also prompted by the fact that girls are not called on as often as boys in these subject classes, they have less talk time, and they are not held to the same standards for shouting out versus hand-raising. To be completely honest, I notice these issues at play today in my Master's level classrooms. As a broad generalization, men speak out more in my cohort and they yell out more often as opposed to raising their hands. I don't feel necessarily robbed of any educational experience. Thankfully I am a grown woman and learned from my women's studies classes about how to assert myself. However, I know I am out of my element here in Boston and it's not a place like Portland, Oregon where everybody's automatically a feminist and very knowledgeable about all kinds of issues. As I've learned from what my classmates sometimes say about disabilities, this is not a very PC place! And in a way that's a true indicator of diversity, diversity of knowledge, awareness, and viewpoints. So it's good and I'm embracing it for what it is. So in any case I'm glad I got to present that article and it made me think a lot about the specific struggles girls have with math. What was interesting about this study is that it showed that women did better in the single-sex classrooms in terms of achievement and the way they perceived their competence. However, the girls still struggled with some attitudes towards math, like they didn't look forward to it as much as boys generally do and they put way more effort into math in the single-sex room than girls did in co-ed environments or than boys did in general. I'm not sure if there are some parts of math that are more challenging for girls naturally or if there are some societal issues at play here. It's not so sexy for a girl to be good at math or something, is my guess. It could also be limitations of the study.

As a previous gender studies major, I hope to be sensitive to any gender/sexuality issues at play in my classroom. I really hope my experiences and studies will serve me. I also hope it will remind me to be open to new information and to remember that although I know my own perspective as a woman and I've read about other perspectives, there are a lot of perspectives I don't know! It behooves me to learn about others and help them advocate for themselves in new ways that they need too.