Three Cheers for Dylan!

I was blown away in reading about Dylan’s subtraction victories! For a student to create their own strategies and apply it to all different subtraction problems is exactly the outcome that we as teachers want for our students. He used thinking skills to develop his own method for subtraction that makes sense for him, although he needed support in explaining his process. In essence, this is what the common core standards are aiming to do-allow students to work out problems in different ways and then explaining their work. However, our math curriculum has not caught up to this yet. Our math curriculum is very narrow-sighted when it comes to methods and procedures, often forcing students to use the curriculum’s specified way to solve problems on tests. Another obstacle is the number of students we have in class. It would take a tremendous amount of time to sit down with each student and examine and analyze their methods-especially if the student was unable to understand a way to arrive at a correct answer. With lower class sizes teachers would be able to offer students more personalized attention and instruction. If we were able to offer students the freedom to explore and invent their own strategies I believe students would have a more solid foundation of math and number sense.