Teaching Seventh Grade Math
Uploaded by liebermann on Oct 31, 2011
This essay provides a course outline by answering 11 questions regarding teaching math at the seventh-grade level. Teaching Math
I Introduction
This paper doesn’t follow our usual format; instead, it answers specific questions regarding teaching math to seventh-graders. In working on the outline, I’ve also tried to be aware of the commonalities among math, science and technology, and provide meaningful “real life” responses. As a general observation, it seems that many of the resources I’ve found tend to tie these three disciplines together.
II Questions
1: What should be taught to satisfy the requirements at various levels? What are students interested in? What should they already know? What materials are needed to organize a unit?
Describing state and local standards obviously depends on the location of the school. Searching for “standards seventh-grade math proficiency” has brought 3,800 hits; I’ve compared the first three and found many commonalities. Perhaps the most interesting is that heavy emphasis is put on the idea of solving real world problems. Math is no longer an abstract concept, but is linked to science and technology, with problems designed to show why math is a strong tool in other disciplines. The sources also mention that students will be expected to use calculators and computers in their courses. Specific competencies that students must demonstrate to satisfy local requirements in these systems include working with integers, fractions, and ratios; solving algebraic equations; analyzing and graphing data; solving geometrical problems; and understanding measurements. Space makes this a very incomplete list; the students are facing a very rigorous curriculum in these three schools. (The three are Olentangy, Riverdeep and Yokota, and their complete URL’s are listed in the reference section. Yokota is a school for American dependents whose parents are stationed in Japan.)
Since it’s a populous state, I’ve looked at California’s standards. There is a tremendous debate going on because the state standards are less challenging in their use of creativity and initiative than some of the local standards. That is, California seems to have gone “back to basics,” such as learning multiplication tables by rote and doing long division by hand, rather than setting problems that reflect real world situations. At any rate, California expects its seventh-graders to demonstrate number sense; knowledge of algebra and functions; knowledge of measurement and geometry; statistics, data and probability; and mathematical reasoning ability....