Mathematics Education in the Middle Grades Teaching to Meet the Needs of Middle Grades Learners and to Maintain High Expectations: Proceedings of a National Convocation and Action Conferences (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Pages 129-138
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From page 129... ...
_~ :r;w~ REFLECTIONS ON THE CONVOCATION Edward Silver, Chair, Program Steering Committee for the Convocation, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh
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From page 131... ...
The Convocation took as a premise that this dual commitment to both the development of mathematical ideas and the development of children actually could, in many ways, mask differences in perspective regarding these two emphases; that is, individuals and groups might differ with respect to the relative emphasis of these two commitments in their work. For most of us, although both are important, one looms larger in our thinking than the other.
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From page 132... ...
That is, good mathematics for middle grades students has to be tied to some important application or something related in some important way to students' lives. Glenda Lappan told us on the first night that we need to connect students to things that are generally interesting Ml DDLE GRADES CONVOCATION to them, and Tom Dickinson described students who were gathering (lata in experiments about questions that were genuinely of interest to them and then displaying the data.
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From page 133... ...
~ taught seventh grade in the South Bronxin New YorkCity. Oneofthe students in my class was named Jeffrey.
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From page 134... ...
If you think about the video involving Cindy, she was teaching an algebra course, but the way she was teaching that algebra course strikes me as somewhat (lifferent than our caricature of the way in which the first year of high school algebra is typically taught. If we think about the set of i(leas that Glen(la talked about on the first night, the set of ideas that you might have read about in the first discussion session on algebra in the mi(l(lle gra(les section (lrawn from the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics: Discussion Draft, or in other materials for this Convocation, you get a (lifferent view.
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From page 135... ...
There were a number of people who CLOSING REMARKS talked about the politics that surround reform ideas, whether they were middle school reform ideas or mathematics reform ideas. And many kinds of politics have been mentioned in this Convocation community politics, district politics, school politics, personal politics, professional politics, and so on ~ remember from my first year of teaching when we were trying to create "open classrooms," which was then the avant-garde reform idea.
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From page 136... ...
There is a serious set of issues that have to be addressed in terms of unpacking for Ml DDLE GRADES CONVOCATION ourselves and for the whole community what it means to say that students are learning algebra, and what it would mean for all students to learn algebra. Can we design programs so that students succeed in learning algebra in the middle grades?
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From page 137... ...
We want all students to have the opportunities that mathematical competency and mathematical proficiency affords them. Some people call it "mathematical power." Some CLOSING REMARKS people don't like that term, but that's what it's about.
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From page 138... ...
And then lastly, ~ want to mention the notion of identity because Mary Kay Stein talked a little bit about it this morning, and it came up very strongly in the discussion group sessions. Maybe not everybody would attach the word identity to this notion, but some participants are asking questions about how a teacher should balance attention Ml DDLE GRADES CONVOCATION to competing demands for a group of students.
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