8 teachers+8 UA grad students. Hoped-for sum: improved math

As a graduate student gearing up for her doctorate, Gorlina routinely teaches introductory math courses at the University of Arizona. What she sees are students who might know rote procedure but don't grasp underlying concepts. Or worse, students who don't know the basic steps and can't even add fractions.

The 27-year-old, who hails from Belarus, formerly part of the Soviet Union, also has been struck by how often people will openly confess that they wouldn't know pi from pie or a cosine from a cousin.

"In this society, it's considered OK to say you're bad at math," she said. "You would never hear someone telling strangers that they're illiterate, yet, somehow, math in the United States isn't on the same level of importance as literacy."

So when Gorlina had a chance to join a program that would link her with a K-12 class for 10 hours a week for a year, she jumped at the opportunity to find out what's going wrong and how it might be righted.

Gorlina is one of eight UA graduate students who will partner with a school math teacher under a new $3 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

They won't be student teachers as much as they'll be specialists, helping teachers become more effective at what they do. The graduate students will be paid $30,000 for their efforts, with participating teachers receiving stipends ranging from $2,750 to $4,500.

The grant couldn't come at a better time, with a heightened demand for math teachers even as this year's high school freshmen will begin taking four years of math to graduate.

And it comes amid worries that other countries are gearing up to run laps around the United States in math and science proficiency. The most recent findings from the Program for International Student Assessment found in 2006 that U.S. 15-year-olds performed below the international average of 57 education systems on math literacy.

More locally, statewide math scores on the recent AIMS round in 2008 showed 42 percent of high school students still aren't passing muster.

William McCallum, director of the UA math department, said teachers are aching for assistance. Seventy teachers applied to team up with a graduate student. Eight were rewarded, in the Casa Grande, Tucson and Sunnyside school districts.

He sees this program in the short term as a way to help students obtain a stronger foundation in math and in the long term as a way to lure more people into teaching about numbers. And he hopes the students will learn a lesson in persistence.

"There's a common belief that you either have the math gene or you don't," he said. "It's not just about natural talent. You can learn by making an effort, and we want to stop them from just turning it off."

Grant Peterson, another graduate student, thought long and hard about where he wanted to be placed, and he ultimately settled on middle school. That's about the time that students start doing poorly in math and losing interest, he said.

Peterson, who will work with Mansfeld Middle School, said he's fairly certain that the mechanics of worksheets and the drone of drills aren't the best way to teach math. Instead, he wants to guide students to discovering answers on their own.

In teaching basic probability, for example, he might give them a jar holding equal amounts of black and pinto beans and ask them, without counting the beans, to find ways of ferreting out the proportion of each.

As a teacher of basic math at the university, he, too, has noticed that students often just want to be handed a formula and told how to do the problem — but many of the biggest questions mathematicians grapple with have no clear-cut answer.

"I think it's because they've always had someone tell them," he said. "Ideally, if you start challenging them to explore concepts from the beginning, it will be ingrained in them as they progress."

David Kukla, who teaches geometry, pre-calculus and calculus at Sabino High School, is already at the top of his game, last year earning the über-prestigious Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

But Kukla, who is spending his summer taking a college class to learn more advanced calculus concepts, said that while he's able to teach students to think mathematically, he'll rely on his UA partner, Gorlina, to help them begin to think like mathematicians. He insists it's not a semantic difference.

Mathematicians, he said, will guess at an answer and then poke and prod until they find out if they're right. It's a function of breaking problems into components and attacking them. It involves doggedness, a lot of creativity and even a little magic.

Gorlina spoke to his class four times last year, he said, before the program was created, which is why they were a natural fit for a partnership. "My own mind was melting, and my brightest students were just running to keep up with her," he said.

With her assistance, he's learned about tenets of Non-Euclidean geometry — a curious universe in which the sum of the angles of a triangle doesn't necessarily add up to 180 degrees and parallel lines may intersect.

And for those students who don't care about such abstractions, he wants them to know that prime numbers are the key to the swipe of an ATM card, that equations can help them determine how many cans of paint it will take to paint their homes and that graph theory isn't really that far off from mapping a route through town.

"I think all the excitement and love of math that they have with me," he predicted, "will just be compounded as doors are opened and mysteries are unveiled."

DID YOU KNOW

This isn't the first collaboration between the UA and area K-12 teachers.

There are ongoing programs in the sciences.

And a $1 million federal grant recently linked two dozen "lead" history teachers with university graduate students, who were able to flesh out any holes in the teachers' knowledge and help them develop better ways to draw students into the drama of the past.