I have a recurring dream that’s haunted my sleep since I graduated high school: I show up to math class wholly unprepared for the day’s exam. Apparently, I’ve managed to go an entire semester without cracking a book; I haven’t attended class, haven’t taken a note. I am hopelessly lost.
Nowadays, I also have a recurring nightmare that visits my barely-still-awake hour around 9 p.m., usually on Sundays: my daughter comes to me holding her math textbook, tearfully insisting that she is hopelessly lost.
My daughter and I found our most recent source of frustration on page 150 of Core-Plus Mathematics: Contemporary Mathematics in Context (Glencoe-McGraw Hill, 2008), her textbook for 8th grade algebra, in a sentence presumably meant to illuminate the concept of linear function: “A key feature of any function is the way the value of the dependent variable changes as the value of the independent changes.”
Not instantly able to explain it to her, I tried to buy a little time by reading the sentence aloud once, then twice. After a third reading, I searched my daughter’s face, hoping for some sign that she understood. All I got was a vacant stare and a whiny “Huh?”
My daughter is an honors student. She gets good grades in math, although I can tell it doesn’t come as easily to her as reading and writing. I’ve had issues with her math textbooks throughout all of her school years, not just the one she’s using in the 8th grade—in fact, her book this year is better than most—but I’ve never complained to her teachers. As a parent, I choose to let my daughter and her teachers work without my interference for mainly selfish reasons: I doubt my complaining will help my daughter’s cause in the least.
But as a journalist, I’m loathe to keep my mouth shut, so I set out last week to find out whether there’s a particular reason math textbooks used in public schools are often dull, impenetrable and confusing. I also wondered if, as one Northampton math teacher told me privately last week, the goal of making math accessible to students plays second fiddle to other agendas, including adherence to state-promulgated standards and the promotion of the vocational value of math skills in the modern economy. As I looked through my daughter’s text book, I wondered what agenda drove the inclusion of real world scenarios like this: “For example, Barry represents a credit card company on college campuses. He entices students with free gifts—hats, water bottles and T-shirts—to complete a credit card application. The graph on the next page shows the relationship between Barry’s daily pay and the number of credit card applications he collects.”
I began my inquiry with a flood of emails to college math professors, asking for help determining whether my difficulty understanding a textbook treatment of linear function is a sign of my math deficit—do I simply lack a math brain?—or just a sign that the writing is dull and confusing. Only one professor at an esteemed local college was kind enough to reply, sending me a long email explaining why he didn’t want to add his two cents. My favorite part: “Any response to the ‘is it me or the book?’ question would be subjective opinion at best, and I am neither qualified nor comfortable in expressing views that can’t be backed up.”
As a reporter, I have learned that the world of academics—nursery school to graduate school, public, private and parochial—is a complicated one to navigate, layered with bureaucracy and filled with closed doors. Without benefit of higher-ed expertise, I looked next to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, contacting Communications Director Jackie Reis to talk about how textbooks used in Massachusetts public schools are selected and evaluated. Reis replied promptly, saying she was “very busy here over the next two days, but I’ll see what I can do. The short answer is that textbooks are a local issue, so you may want to start with districts.”
I responded to Reis by noting that there are 15 people in the staff directory listed as working on “Curriculum & Instruction: Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics.” Couldn’t one of them speak with me? Reis didn’t respond.
It occurred to me at this point in my research that, with greater proficiency in math on my part, I might be lounging around some swank tropical resort counting my millions instead of chasing a herd of education bureaucrats to find out why my kid’s textbook sucks. But I wasn’t about to quit now. I called school districts. Northampton. Amherst. Easthampton. I explained what I was looking for to one administrative assistant after another, only to hear the same refrain: I’d need to talk with the superintendent, and that would take some time. With my deadline rapidly approaching, I lucked out when I called Springfield’s new superintendent, Daniel Warwick, whose executive assistant gave me contact information for a number of educators who’d be delighted to talk.
When I read Ron St. Amand the line from the textbook that had stumped me, he laughed heartily. I asked him if I were unusual in finding the sentence impenetrable.
“No!” St. Amand said, still laughing. “I don’t think so. Not at all! The way we’d teach that in a classroom would be to do an experiment with temperature to illustrate the idea of the independent variable…” St. Amand cut himself off—he must have sensed my attention starting to wander—and turned back to the sentence, still amused: “…so, yes, the sentence is awkward and hard to understand. There needed to be more context.”
As Science Director for the Springfield Public Schools, Amand sits on the textbook committees that evaluate and select the classroom material used in math and science courses. “Of course, student interest comes into play in the selection of textbooks,” he says. “We ask, ‘Is this text accessible?’” But, in a public education system held accountable for student performance on standardized tests, student interest isn’t the only driver, he said. “Certainly, Common Core standards are particularly driving the selection of these texts,” he added, referring to federal curriculum requirements that undergird standardized testing in Massachusetts.
St. Amand noted that, in math and science, “it’s not always the case that the textbook is the cornerstone of the learning process.” In an English class, the text is the subject, and a bad text can be a significant barrier to student interest and engagement. In math, “the text is often only a [supplemental] resource.” Teachers engage kids in math and science, St. Amand said, “by doing math and science.”
Ryan Hackett is a full-time math tutor in the Forward Five program in Springfield, which seeks to improve math scores in inner-city schools by adding a math tutoring class to the students’ regular day. One of the first things Hackett tells me is that the tutors don’t use textbooks, but instead work one-on-one with students to “do math.”
When I ask if he’s run into problems with badly written, inaccessible and confusing textbooks, his response is unequivocal: “Absolutely! One hundred percent! Yes!” In fact, teaching kids to translate math into English and vice-versa is one of the hardest parts of his job, even with fairly good writing: “Word problems are the most difficult challenges these students face. They have to learn the language of math.”
Standardized testing, Hackett told me, tends to interfere with a teacher’s ability to engage students enough to help them through the hard challenges of learning math, driving a kind of fear-based conformity in teaching: “MCAS sort of rules all. We have to cater to the tests. It limits your ability to perform as a teacher.”
Hackett said that it’s important to put concepts across in terms students can relate to, but that textbooks were notorious for being tone-deaf. The example of Barry enticing college kids to fill out credit card applications, he said, “shows how this stuff gets kind of silly.”
In the end, Hackett declined to diagnose the severity of my own math problem, but he said he believes that there are people who just can’t put numbers together. “They’re few and far between,” he said, “but I really think there are people who are basically math disabled.”
I doubt my daughter or I are so afflicted, but it’s a shame the confidence-zapping language we grapple with in her textbooks makes us wonder.•
