Teacher Jennifer Dial Santoro asked her eighth-grade geometry class to throw the formula out the window and instead try to reason out the area of shapes drawn on a large grid.
Didma Valenzuela, a girl in the front with her head down, struggled with a parallelogram. Then the class was given a shape that looked like an Egyptian sphinx. Didma figured that she could fill up the space inside the shape with triangles and rectangles and use them to find the area.
"Yes!" she said, slapping Santoro's hand. "And I did it all by myself."
The class in Anne Arundel County's Marley Middle School represents to Santoro the best kind of teaching: students learning to understand the abstract thinking behind math rules and formulas. Too much of the time, Santoro believes, math teachers are flying over material, never giving students a deep grasp of the subject.
It is a complaint that has echoed across the nation. But what is taught in math classrooms in Maryland could be on the verge of changing. In the next several months, math educators here will decide whether they want to slim down the curriculum, focusing on a deeper understanding of a few basic tenets and excluding some of the extraneous material that teachers such as Santoro feel is hindering instruction.
Maryland's soul-searching, and that of more than a dozen states across the country, is the result of a report by a well-regarded group of math educators, the National Council of Teachers of Math. The council released a grade-by-grade list of three essential concepts - just three per year - that each student should learn in kindergarten through eighth grade.
Council President Francis "Skip" Fennell said the organization wanted to address the long-held criticism that America's math curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep. He hopes that states will change their standards to be more in line with the council's Focal Points report.
"The report is driving those kind of discussions. Already we have spoken to about 12 to 15 states that are doing that," Fennell said.
The discussion is part of a decade-long debate over whether the country has gone too far from the basics toward reform math, a more creative approach that came to be known as "fuzzy" math by detractors. Those who believe in the basics are celebrating, saying they hope the new report will force a 180-degree turn in math instruction.
