Mailbag II: Math standards, teacher content knowledge, and more with Jonathan Regino (Ep 74)

[upbeat music] This one is from Robin, and Robin writes, "I love your podcast.

I have recently started teaching middle school math.

Many of my students lack basics, and so even on topics like fractions, I am reteaching concepts I would have assumed they mastered years ago." So as I said, another sort of version of that same question about gaps.

"I am wondering to what extent the breadth of the standards is causing teachers to move from topic to topic too quickly without adequate practice to move from novice to master.

For example, I am wishing that I could exclude any equations information at all from sixth grade if we haven't truly mastered fractions.

I'm hoping you can find some guests to discuss whether the standards might be moving too quickly through topics and depriving students of mastery.

I wonder if the state reorganized the system, simplified it, and reduced it, if we might get stronger results." Thoughts, Jon?

There's two different directions you can go with this.

So number one, the reason why you're doing review is because the students aren't getting the content to long-term memory.

The way most textbooks are designed, even the ones that are circular and keep coming back, they aren't doing interleaving or space practice correctly.

I teach a lesson, the next day I move on to the next concept, or I add the next layer onto that concept.

It's not enough time for a student to get that stuff into long-term memory.

It's not enough practice to get it into long-term memory.

If you find yourself always reviewing, or when a state test comes, you shut down, and for a week you're practicing for the state test, chances are that the kids aren't learning the material well enough to get it so it's in that long-term stage.

There's not much as, uh, from the teacher level that you can do.

If, you know, your curriculum's not designed for that, then you are essentially rewriting your own curriculum, and depending on the rules in your school district, you might be allowed or not allowed to do that.

If you are doing a ton of review, you're gonna have to remove content.

In Pennsylvania, we have 180 school days, and that's it.

And you take in the testing days, the state testing days, the assemblies, and everything else, you have way less than 180 days.

So if I'm gonna spend two, three weeks reviewing, I'm gonna have to remove two, three weeks of content.

One way you could do that is think of math as patterns.

Math builds off itself, and if you teach math in a version of patterns, you can save yourself a lot of time.

So a lot of Asian countries teach math this way.

So for example, in America, we teach one digit plus one digit, and then one digit by two digit, then two by two, and then two by three, and then three by three, and so on.

In a lot of Asian countries, they teach that as a pattern.