Math and Reading

I had a course called "Reading for the Content Areas" when I was in college preparing to become a teacher. The course was supposed to teach us how to integrate reading into our classes in a meaningful way. For the liberal arts/humanities majors, that was no big deal. After all, that's how you get most of your information in a history or english class. It's not even very hard to develop good reading materials for a science course either, as a great many scientific phenomenon can be explained easily in words. But when it comes to math, the only thing my professor could come up with was "I'm sure you could write a word problem that relates to this. . ." Gee, thanks for the meaningful use of reading in the math classroom.

Now, textbooks can be considered reading, but they aren't really very well written most of the time, and they certainly aren't engaging. That leaves us with the source material from the mathematicians who created mathematics. In case you were wondering, these are even less intelligible to students (and most teachers) than the textbooks. What's a teacher to do?

It turns out that there are a handful of interesting mathematical stories that can be used in the classroom to guide exploration and deepen student understanding of mathematics. One of my favorites, although a bit hard to read, is the fictional work Flatland: A romance of many dimensions. It explores what dimensions are (geometrically speaking) and explores the idea of how we as humans might be able to envision a 4th dimension. Written by Edwin A. Abbot (as told by A. Square), it is also a social commentary on the time period in which it was written. For example, women are portrayed as acute triangles, their pointy ends making them "narrow" minded and hard to reason with. Men (obtuse triangles, squares and other polygons), had to do their best to watch out for angry women, because they might pierce a man with their pointy heads without even realizing it. It is a perfect book for any geometry class.

The ony problem with this is that many students these days are not the best readers. Most of the students I deal with would probably not be able to read the book on their own; they might have trouble understanding the mathematics being explored; they wouldn't appreciate the humor in some of the descriptions of various "people" in flatland; and they might decide not to read it at all. A thoughtful teacher might arrange for several days of reading aloud and sustained silent reading during class so that students begin to understand the flow of the language and the issues the author explores. She might write up some questions to guide their reflections on the story, asking them what they think the author is trying to get at in certain places. She might even ask them to draw pictures or make reenactments of the story to deepen their understanding.

When I had to do my project for the "Reading for the Content Areas" class, I chose Flatland as my reading material and develped just such a unit. I havent' ever used it. Partly because I underestimate my students and partly because I too have fallen into the curriculum trap. There's so much to get done that I settle for quantity rather than quality. Instead of gaining a deep understanding of what dimensions are, I gloss over it and hit the next topic. NJ state standards require that students "know" a certain number of topics. That means that I cannot spend the time on each topic developing the depth I want to. Always on to the next topic.

And, as it turns out, the topics I discussin 9th grade are repeated in 11th grade. So, instead of doing a bad job on a lot of topics (which will have to be repeated because none of the students ever developed understanding), why don't we do a really good job on fewer topics which we won't have to repeat?

Ooops, I got side tracked.

What I'm getting at is that it is possible to incorporate good reading into a good math class. It takes some effort and creativity to do it, but it's worth it in the end. Not only do students learn math in more depth, but they learn how to read about math and how to write about math at the same time.