MY YEAR AS A TEACHER Formula for Failure A curriculum over most kids' heads + few tools to teach it = little learning Series: MY YEAR AS A TEACHER. Chapter 5/Curriculum CITY Edition

Ironically, my school had an excellent, easy-to-follow textbook series for the sixth and seventh grades, and math teachers for these grades also had a supplement from the Board of Education with ideas, including games, for teaching their curriculum. The eighth grade had neither. The Board of Educati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNewsday
Main Author BY EMILY SACHAR
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 01.12.1989
EditionCombined editions
Subjects
Kowalski, Vikki
Sachar, Emily
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Summary:Ironically, my school had an excellent, easy-to-follow textbook series for the sixth and seventh grades, and math teachers for these grades also had a supplement from the Board of Education with ideas, including games, for teaching their curriculum. The eighth grade had neither. The Board of Education has not devised a step-by-step manual for teaching its eighth-grade math outline, and neither has the district I worked in. Larry, a student in 8-16, was one of them. He had mastered basic arithmetic years earlier and was tracked into the bottom class only because of his low score on the standardized reading test the previous spring. He was eager to study the curriculum I was supposed to teach, and I often thought he had a real chance of making it to college and finding a career built on mathematics. But if I taught the curriculum to him and to the one or two others who were ready for it, I'd lose the 12 students who didn't know their times tables. And there was always that nagging question of whether - and how - to teach the times tables to junior high kids. 1) Photo-Two pages from the Board of Education's curriculum outline for eighth grade math. 2) Newsday Photo by [Emily Sachar]-Some of the students in one of Sachar's math classes before the start of the period. The room was repainted last summer. 3) Newsday Photo by Donna Dietrich-Assistant Principal [Vikki Kowalski], Sachar's eighth-grade supervisor.