Testimonials

Reports collected from urban and suburban schools.

Many suc­cess sto­ries have vital­ized The Expert Math­e­mati­cian (TEM) project. One of the first mid­dle school teach­ers to con­duct a year-long pilot had not taught a learn­er-cen­tered program.

His class­room had tables with com­put­ers and wires run­ning all over, with occa­sion­al out­ages caused by trip­ping. Through a com­bi­na­tion of direct teach­ing and stu­dents work­ing at the com­put­ers dai­ly, achieve­ment, infor­mal­ly mea­sured, was ade­quate. At a board meet­ing at year’s end, anoth­er math teacher com­ment­ed, “I don’t under­stand what you were doing in your class­room, but all year I had stu­dents beg­ging me to let them trans­fer to your class. What­ev­er you were doing, we should keep it in the curriculum.”

An infor­mal lunch­room sur­vey was tak­en sev­er­al years after a TEM teacher left a small ele­men­tary school where TEM was still being taught. The ques­tion put to stu­dents: “What is your favorite activ­i­ty?” Above all oth­er activ­i­ties, includ­ing recess, school plays and all aca­d­e­mics, the answer kept com­ing up: “Logo.”

Two ninth grade reme­di­al edu­ca­tion teach­ers (one urban, one sub­ur­ban) com­ment­ed on some of their most at-risk stu­dents who seemed nev­er to be able to learn any­thing. Their com­ments were sim­i­lar: “It’s hard to explain exact­ly what they are learn­ing, but they dili­gent­ly work alone and def­i­nite­ly seem to be learn­ing some­thing. What’s strik­ing is that it seems dif­fi­cult, but they want to do the math.”
A sixth grade teacher want­ed to stop TEM lessons before the end of the school year and stu­dents complained–they want­ed to con­tin­ue to the last day of school.

A sixth grade teacher in a dif­fer­ent school with one com­put­er in his class­room offered to allow his stu­dents to do TEM lessons after com­plet­ing assigned work. Begin­ning in Octo­ber, one began, soon attract­ing 4 oth­ers. The teacher com­ment­ed: “These stu­dents were there before me in the morn­ing, and stayed after school in the evening. They would­n’t go out to recess. They flew through the whole 3 year pro­gram in 5 months. I was amazed by what they learned. I’ve nev­er seen any­thing like this in 30 years of teach­ing.” Par­ents of mid­dle school inner city stu­dents were infor­mal­ly sur­veyed about their chil­dren’s stud­ies involv­ing TEM. Most report­ed hear­ing many excit­ing sto­ries from their chil­dren and strong­ly sup­port­ed the program.

The teacher who con­duct­ed the sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­ment report­ed else­where on this site, pro­vid­ed inter­est­ing quotes—among them: “In Octo­ber, I gave my stu­dents a bath­room break and nobody moved. That’s the first time that’s hap­pened to me in 6 years of teach­ing.” Since TEM was ini­tial­ly designed to reme­di­ate sec­ondary stu­dents who had repeat­ed­ly failed an 8th grade exit test (over 5 years, 6 per­cent­age points gained per trimester), suc­cess sto­ries involv­ing math­e­mat­i­cal­ly at-risk teens are pleas­ant to hear but not sur­pris­ing. At the end of the TEM-SBR exper­i­ment, the teacher was astound­ed to find the names of the two high­est gain­ing and total scor­ing stu­dents in any of his class­es. It was two girls who had the low­est pretest scores and who were noto­ri­ous­ly unhy­gien­ic and prob­lem­at­ic. They had been sus­pend­ed dur­ing the school year for using abu­sive lan­guage. They worked alone and would not accept help from the teacher. Yet, they excelled.

Two oth­er small tri­als: Mate­ri­als were giv­en to high poten­tial 4th graders and found to be high­ly chal­leng­ing, but man­age­able and engag­ing. A 3rd grade teacher used select­ed activ­i­ties through a school year for a mas­ters degree the­sis study. Par­ent vol­un­teers pro­vid­ed read­ing sup­port, but stu­dents could do many of the activ­i­ties and the teacher was hap­py with outcomes.

A sev­enth grade sub­ur­ban teacher: “My stu­dents are the best in geom­e­try I’ve ever had.”

Published Review

A vet­er­an high school teacher and long­time NCTM mem­ber wrote a com­pre­hen­sive review that was pub­lished in The Math­e­mat­ics Teacher, a jour­nal of the NCTM. The review­er eval­u­at­ed mate­ri­als with stu­dents and read through it. Among his com­ments were that the “…math­e­mat­ics are sound…and they align well with the NCTM Stan­dards.” These are essen­tial fea­tures for effec­tive math­e­mat­ics media in the Unit­ed States.

He also found that the nov­el approach worked well with at-risk stu­dents, and rec­om­mend­ed that it be used in the mid­dle school curriculum.