[S]towe High School students are looking forward to taking a new math course next fall, says Kaaren Meyer, math instructional coach at the high school.
The new course, Essential Math for College and Career, known as EMC2, prepares students for career or college math straight out of high school, to ensure they won’t have to languish in remedial college math classes, which don’t carry credits but do cost money.
It will also help students who choose to go directly into the workforce to hit the ground running.
Last summer, Meyer and eight other educators around the state, including college and high school teachers and career specialists, formed a group to craft a math program that would allow students to avoid remedial courses.
“There’s too many students in remedial,” Meyer said.
Many students who have struggled with math opt not to take a fourth-year math class, sticking instead to just Algebra I and II and geometry, Meyer said.
“All high school students should have four years of math,” she said. “That fourth year is crucial.”
As a math instructional coach — a professional who works with math teachers to help them optimize their lessons and help students grasp the material — Meyer’s perspective was invaluable on the nine-person committee to put the class together.
There are 41 “essential concepts” in high school math, Meyer said.
The class distilled those 41 down to 16, the crux of what students need to know for college.
It took the educators a week to winnow those concepts down into a single class.
The college educators didn’t think statistics study was necessary, but Meyer pushed for it, saying if students want to move right into a career rather than attend college, statistics education is vital.
Out those 16 essential concepts, the group put together eight key math practices for students and eight teaching guidelines.
The list of essential concepts includes not only being able to solve an algebraic equation, but to use it to make predictions about the future; being able to visualize data in forms, including charts and graphs; and being able to understand and translate units of measurement.
When the group finished putting the class together, it incorporated a similar program put together by the Southern Regional Education Board, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Georgia.
Since Meyer teaches at Stowe High, it was chosen to be one of four Vermont high schools to pilot the Essential Math for College and Career course, along with Green Mountain Union High School, Richford Junior/Senior High School and Springfield High School.
Teachers will undergo training to teach the class this summer, and students will be able to sign up this fall, Meyer said.
She doesn’t know yet how many will take it, but she says students have told her they’re excited by the possibility of jumpstarting their college careers, rather than chewing up time in remedial math.
The Vermont State Colleges System, which includes Northern Vermont University campuses in Johnson and Lyndon, has agreed that completion of Essential Math for College and Career will qualify students to take credit-bearing math classes.
Meyer has been asking students whether they’ll take the class.
“One student said to me, ‘Absolutely. He said, ‘Once I knew it would get me ready for college, I was signing up for it, no question.’ That was the exciting piece. That’s what we wanted to hear,” Meyer said.
Demystifying math
Essential Math for College and Career isn’t for students who are ready to enroll in Advanced Placement math courses, or those who have made it past Algebra II, Meyer said.
Instead, it’s for those who like math, but struggle with it, or for students who otherwise wouldn’t have taken a fourth math class.
“We didn’t want it to be the same thing all over again,” Meyer said. “These are students, perhaps, who have struggled, who maybe don’t love math, and the real goal is to help them understand the concepts they would need to move forward.”
The class is structured a little differently from traditional math classes, with alternate testing and learning methods built in, to help students engage with the material and take some of the fear out of studying math.
The first lesson involves figuring out how many pushups Bucky Badger, the mascot for the University of Wisconsin football team, does in a 56-point game. The person wearing the Bucky suit has to do a pushup for every point the team scores, every time it scores.
It’s “more engaging” to look at a problem that way than as an abstract notion, and embodies quantitative reasoning, one of the essential concepts of the course, Meyer said.
In the beginning, teachers have more control over the course, but as the semester advances, students begin to present more material themselves as they grow more confident, Meyer said.
It’s crucial for kids to know the 16 essential math concepts when they leave high school, Meyer said.
Those concepts are used in “a very long list” of life skills, she said, such as paying taxes, writing checks, understanding numbers presented in newspaper articles or on television, and working in businesses such as restaurants, hotels and retail stores.
