Common Core means a new approach to high school math
CEDAR CITY – The Iron County School District is now in its third year of implementing the new core curriculum, which has resulted in drastic changes in the way math is taught in high schools.
Jet Warr, secondary math specialist for the ICSD, said the first of the instruction in core curriculum for high school math actually got started in the 2011-2012 school year with Level 1. The rest of the Common Core math followed in the 2012-2013 school year, including eighth-grade math.
She said her role is to assist the secondary math teachers in the district, including middle and high schools, with implementing the new state standards for math. She also works on organizing their professional development opportunities.
Warr said she, along with the secondary math teachers, finished creating the curriculum map for the district during the summer. The task involved organizing the order in which mathematical concepts would be taught.
"We don't have very many math books that follow the Utah state standards yet, so we have not purchased textbooks," she said. "There are textbooks out there that say that they're aligned with the Utah Core, but they are falling a little bit short."
Warr said another aspect of her job is to locate and collect resources for the secondary math teachers, which she is working on.
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Kylie Findley, who teaches secondary math to freshmen and juniors at Canyon View High School, said this is the second year she has been teaching high school math, so she has never taught in the way that it was done in the past by having a course plan to follow that included Algebra 1, Geometry and Trigonometry, etc. However, when she was in high school, she had followed the old course plan.
"Actually, I really like the switch a lot, especially, I would have loved it if I was in high school," Findley said.
She explained that the way the courses were set up when she attended high school, students would usually take Algebra 1, Geometry and then Algebra 2.
"So there's like this disjoint that would happen back in those days because you'd take a year off of doing any algebra," she said.
The way math is being taught in the high schools now is superior to the way it was taught in the past, Findley said, because the students get to work with algebra, geometry and statistics every year, which helps them build on their knowledge for those areas.
The new course pattern for the three years of required high school math is learning algebra, geometry and statistics in their freshman year, then adding some trigonometry in their sophomore year. The junior year of math continues to combine algebra, geometry and statistics with some more trigonometry and pre-calculus thrown in.
Findley said she feels that the way high school math courses are arranged now gives students exposure to many more forms of higher math than she had when she was in high school, because when she entered college, she had never taken a statistics class or trigonometry class.
Many students may not take specific classes in statistics or trigonometry in high school if they are not required to, but when they enter college, they are required to take a Math 1050 class and know a lot of material that they have never been exposed to before.
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Emma Schafer is a parent of a girl who has already gone through high school the old way that math was taught by specific subject and a son who is in middle school and will be in high school next year.
She said she believes that the core curriculum math instruction was "implemented very poorly."
As a result, she is working on a committee to advise the state legislature with improvements for instruction that will make the new standards more student-friendly and teacher-friendly.
Her main disagreement with the new core math is requiring all students in the same grade to take the same math class when there are at differing ability levels.
"I don't think the 'one-size-fits-all' works very well," Schafer said.
She explained that she is trying to work proactively in advance of her son having to tackle high school math next year.
Annie Draper, who teaches math to ninth, 11th and 12th graders at Cedar High School, said she has been teaching for eight years, but this is her first year teaching at CHS.
She said she supports the core curriculum for math and believes that it is heading in a very positive direction because of the higher order thinking expected of the students.
One of the benefits of the core curriculum, Draper said, is helping the students understand number sense. She explained that instead of teaching students how to do algorithms and formulas, the new method of teaching helps students to understand how numbers are put together and the properties that make them up.
"This is an awesome advantage to the students in the way they're learning to think," Draper said.
One of the challenges in teaching according to the core curriculum, she said, is there is a shortage of tangible resources at this time, and there are complaints about no textbooks at this time. However, there are a lot of online resources as well as some provided at the Utah State Office of Education.
Draper said she tries to help her students and their parents by placing her notes regarding classroom work online.
"I've been trying to offset the lack of a tangible book by giving them resources that they can use," she said, noting that she is also available to provide help to her students before and after school as well as during lunch period once a week.
Part of a Series
This is part of a series of articles on the Utah Common Core standards for mathematics focusing on three levels of K-12 education.
Part 1: Elementary school math.
Part 2: Intermediate and middle school math.
• This is Part 3: High school math.