S.F. schools spent $8 million to change the way they teach math. Here's what's new
These books, which came with the recently purchased k-8 math curriculum, the first in 16 years, offer a glimpse of what educators and district officials hope students will discover inside: Math is not only learnable and fun, but also incredibly relevant to the world around them.
For generations of adults raised on the drill-and-kill math of decades past, 'fun' might not be a word they link to long division, the solving for X or those two trains traveling at different speeds toward Boston. The new curriculum, which cost $8 million, includes classroom math toys and digital practice problems with moving parts and instant feedback, making it feel more like a video game.
But what schools and society expects kids to learn in math class has shifted in the past 15 years, in large part because of the Common Core standards, which provided an outline for the skills and knowledge students should have after each grade to prepare them for college and careers. That includes not the ability to do math, but also understanding when and why they would use it.
'If we're telling students how to do something, and they just do it they aren't internalizing,' said Renée Marcy, district director of STEM. 'They need to be able to make sense of it themselves.'
Based on state standardized test scores, the district still has work to do. Less than half of its 48,000 students — just over 45% — were at grade-level proficiency or higher in math in the spring of 2024, the most recent data available. While that was well above the state average of 36%, a deeper look at the data shows subpar performance among subgroups in the district, with 11% of Black students and 17%of Latino students proficient in math.
The goal, district officials said, is to get 65% of eighth graders to proficiency by 2027, up from 42% in 2022.
San Francisco, for the most part, has been using in-house, teacher-developed instruction for nearly two decades, only now purchasing a comprehensive k-8 curriculum from two curriculum development companies — Imagine Learning for elementary schools and Amplify Desmos Math in middle schools.
For k-5, that includes textbooks, workbooks and digital programs. It also provides hands-on games and math tools like blocks that click together, rulers, tiles and more, for each classroom, said Devin Krugman, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction.
While the emphasis is on 'student thinking,' she said, kids still learn the how-to of math as well as the real-world applications, despite initial concerns that the Common Core standards would give short-shrift to the basic functions like solving equations or simple arithmetic.
The goal, Krugman said, is to break the cycle of adults with the same complaint: 'I never used what I learned in math class.'
With classes starting on Aug. 18, hundreds of district teachers signed up for training on the new curriculum this week, which includes a video to introduce concepts that don't talk about math at all.
In one case, a video addressed garbage and landfills and recycling that's crushed into cubes and transported in shipping containers, with the math messaging related to both the reduction of waste and the idea that trash 'takes up space.'
The activities that follow might use hands-on tasks that stack blocks into boxes, for example, and then the math to calculate how many boxes could fit in a container, according to the curriculum.
San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su watched over teachers' shoulders as they navigated through the new curriculum, asking questions and smiling when the digital application gave immediate feedback as a teacher attempted a practice exercise, getting one x,y coordinate wrong when trying to invert a rectangle 180 degrees on a graph. A small red x pointed out the error.
Su, who didn't like math as a child, noted this version of math class looked more like an online puzzle game than a paper and pencil worksheet.
'I wish I'd had a program that was responsive in real time and made math easy,' she said, 'one that made math fun to learn and not so scary.'
Sixth grade teacher Karena Chiu could relate. Math was something she 'had to do' in middle school, a class taught by a teacher who terrified her, with content that confused her.
'I just didn't feel smart or capable of doing math,' she said. 'Math was there. I had to do it.'
She never really understood the why or when of it, though.
'I don't want kids to feel the same way I did,' said Chiu, who teaches the subject at Presidio Middle School. 'I want them to feel like they can do math and follow a career in math if they so choose.'
Her school was among the district sites that piloted the new curriculum last year, providing feedback before the school board approved and purchased it earlier this year.
Chiu said she felt her students were more engaged using the new curriculum, compared to previous years, and it was easy to use.
'I feel like if I had this as a first year teacher, I might have had less stressful nights,' she said. 'Everything is packaged so well.'
The program also allows teachers to see how each child is doing in real time on computer-based practice work.
'I could focus more on the kids who were having a harder time with the math,' Chiu said.
In the spring, Presidio saw 'huge jumps' in sixth and seventh grade test scores, according to Chiu, while district officials said in a statement that 'early results from the pilot demonstrated promising outcomes: Students whose teachers used the new curriculum performed better on standardized testing than those whose teachers used the old one.'
For Chiu, higher test scores are definitely part of the plan, but she has other goals too.
'I feel like all adults have math trauma,' she said. 'We have to break the cycle.'
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San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F. schools spent $8 million to change the way they teach math. Here's what's new
Math will look and feel a lot different in San Francisco schools this year and that seems evident by the picture of the chilled-out chimpanzee on the cover of the new kindergarten textbook, with similar images on subsequent grades. These books, which came with the recently purchased k-8 math curriculum, the first in 16 years, offer a glimpse of what educators and district officials hope students will discover inside: Math is not only learnable and fun, but also incredibly relevant to the world around them. For generations of adults raised on the drill-and-kill math of decades past, 'fun' might not be a word they link to long division, the solving for X or those two trains traveling at different speeds toward Boston. The new curriculum, which cost $8 million, includes classroom math toys and digital practice problems with moving parts and instant feedback, making it feel more like a video game. But what schools and society expects kids to learn in math class has shifted in the past 15 years, in large part because of the Common Core standards, which provided an outline for the skills and knowledge students should have after each grade to prepare them for college and careers. That includes not the ability to do math, but also understanding when and why they would use it. 'If we're telling students how to do something, and they just do it they aren't internalizing,' said Renée Marcy, district director of STEM. 'They need to be able to make sense of it themselves.' Based on state standardized test scores, the district still has work to do. Less than half of its 48,000 students — just over 45% — were at grade-level proficiency or higher in math in the spring of 2024, the most recent data available. While that was well above the state average of 36%, a deeper look at the data shows subpar performance among subgroups in the district, with 11% of Black students and 17%of Latino students proficient in math. The goal, district officials said, is to get 65% of eighth graders to proficiency by 2027, up from 42% in 2022. San Francisco, for the most part, has been using in-house, teacher-developed instruction for nearly two decades, only now purchasing a comprehensive k-8 curriculum from two curriculum development companies — Imagine Learning for elementary schools and Amplify Desmos Math in middle schools. For k-5, that includes textbooks, workbooks and digital programs. It also provides hands-on games and math tools like blocks that click together, rulers, tiles and more, for each classroom, said Devin Krugman, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction. While the emphasis is on 'student thinking,' she said, kids still learn the how-to of math as well as the real-world applications, despite initial concerns that the Common Core standards would give short-shrift to the basic functions like solving equations or simple arithmetic. The goal, Krugman said, is to break the cycle of adults with the same complaint: 'I never used what I learned in math class.' With classes starting on Aug. 18, hundreds of district teachers signed up for training on the new curriculum this week, which includes a video to introduce concepts that don't talk about math at all. In one case, a video addressed garbage and landfills and recycling that's crushed into cubes and transported in shipping containers, with the math messaging related to both the reduction of waste and the idea that trash 'takes up space.' The activities that follow might use hands-on tasks that stack blocks into boxes, for example, and then the math to calculate how many boxes could fit in a container, according to the curriculum. San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su watched over teachers' shoulders as they navigated through the new curriculum, asking questions and smiling when the digital application gave immediate feedback as a teacher attempted a practice exercise, getting one x,y coordinate wrong when trying to invert a rectangle 180 degrees on a graph. A small red x pointed out the error. Su, who didn't like math as a child, noted this version of math class looked more like an online puzzle game than a paper and pencil worksheet. 'I wish I'd had a program that was responsive in real time and made math easy,' she said, 'one that made math fun to learn and not so scary.' Sixth grade teacher Karena Chiu could relate. Math was something she 'had to do' in middle school, a class taught by a teacher who terrified her, with content that confused her. 'I just didn't feel smart or capable of doing math,' she said. 'Math was there. I had to do it.' She never really understood the why or when of it, though. 'I don't want kids to feel the same way I did,' said Chiu, who teaches the subject at Presidio Middle School. 'I want them to feel like they can do math and follow a career in math if they so choose.' Her school was among the district sites that piloted the new curriculum last year, providing feedback before the school board approved and purchased it earlier this year. Chiu said she felt her students were more engaged using the new curriculum, compared to previous years, and it was easy to use. 'I feel like if I had this as a first year teacher, I might have had less stressful nights,' she said. 'Everything is packaged so well.' The program also allows teachers to see how each child is doing in real time on computer-based practice work. 'I could focus more on the kids who were having a harder time with the math,' Chiu said. In the spring, Presidio saw 'huge jumps' in sixth and seventh grade test scores, according to Chiu, while district officials said in a statement that 'early results from the pilot demonstrated promising outcomes: Students whose teachers used the new curriculum performed better on standardized testing than those whose teachers used the old one.' For Chiu, higher test scores are definitely part of the plan, but she has other goals too. 'I feel like all adults have math trauma,' she said. 'We have to break the cycle.'
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
Rethinking Multiple Sclerosis: Why Everything We Thought We Knew Is Changing
The story we used to tell about multiple sclerosis was simple. Clean. Maybe a little too clean. We taught it in lecture halls and explained it to patients. The script was always the same: MS is an autoimmune disease where the body's T-cells—the special forces of the immune system—go rogue. They mistake the nervous system for an invader and attack the myelin sheath, the fatty insulation that keeps our nerve signals moving fast. Strip away that insulation, you get short circuits. Relapses. Disability. It was a neat narrative. T-cells were the clear villain. But the real world is messy. And the clues that our story was wrong came from our own treatments. New therapies came along that absolutely hammered B-cells—another part of the immune army we'd mostly ignored in the MS story. And they worked. Frighteningly well [4]. That begged a huge question. If this was a T-cell war, why was taking out the B-cell infantry so brutally effective? It forced a complete reset. Turns out, B-cells aren't just standing around. They're key players, maybe even the ringleaders that get the T-cells riled up and keep the fires of chronic inflammation burning [1] [2]. This wasn't some minor academic correction. It changed everything. It meant our entire working model of the disease was incomplete. We'd been staring at one piece of the puzzle, thinking it was the whole picture. The neat story was wrong. This disease is a product of a murky conspiracy between a person's genes and some environmental trigger we still can't nail down [3] [10]. A virus from childhood? A chronic deficiency? We have a list of suspects, but no convictions. What we do know is that once it kicks off, it's a cascade of damage. And it's not just about the myelin anymore. It's about the nerve itself. The wire, not just the insulation. First job is getting the diagnosis right. For that, we have the MRI. It's our window into the damage [9]. We hunt for lesions—the scars of past attacks—in the brain and spinal cord. But one picture isn't enough. To be sure it's MS, we have to prove the damage is happening in different places and at different times. Dissemination in space and time. That's the mantra. The McDonald criteria are the rules of the game for this, and they've been sharpened over the years to be faster and more accurate [13]. The 2017 update, for example, cut down the waiting time for a diagnosis. Good. Because time is brain. The sooner we know, the sooner we can act. We even have advanced imaging now that lets us see past the obvious lesions to the subtle, fraying wires underneath it all [15]. But the sharper picture from our MRIs showed us something else. Something uncomfortable. The old textbooks taught us MS was a disease of white people with Northern European roots. That was the classic patient profile. Another part of our simple story. And another part that was dead wrong [8]. The data coming out now paints a very different picture. In the United States, Black individuals don't just get MS—they have the highest incidence of the disease [14]. Hispanic communities are also hit hard. This isn't a footnote. It's the headline. It tells us that MS risk is shaped by more than just ancestry. It's shaped by society. It's about where you live, your access to care, and the systemic biases baked into the world [14]. It's a humbling reality check. A disease doesn't happen in a biological vacuum. It happens in the real world [7]. The last two decades? An absolute explosion in treatments [2] [5]. We went from having almost nothing to a whole arsenal of drugs. The new high-efficacy therapies, especially those B-cell killers, can slam the brakes on relapses and new MRI lesions [4]. They are powerful weapons against the inflammatory part of MS. But stopping the inflammation, we're learning, is only half the job. MS isn't one thing. It's two. A two-headed monster. It is an inflammatory disease, yes. But it is also a neurodegenerative one [2] [6]. From day one, nerve fibers are being quietly damaged and permanently lost. Axonal transection. That's the technical term. It means the nerve fiber is cut. It doesn't grow back. This is the stealthy process that drives progressive disability, the slow worsening that can happen even when a person feels fine. For years, we saw this as a two-act play: an early, inflammatory stage, followed by a later, degenerative stage. Another simple story. Also wrong. We now know they are partners in crime. Inflammation and neurodegeneration are happening at the same time, a vicious cycle running from day one [12]. This changes the mission entirely. The new mandate isn't just to cool down the immune system. It's to protect the brain itself. Neuroprotection. That's the holy grail now [11] [12]. We need drugs that not only stop the attacks but also shield the neurons from the fallout and, maybe, help the brain heal itself. We aren't there yet. But that's where everything is headed. The goalpost moves. It's not just 'no new attacks' anymore. It's 'save the brain.' Preserve function for the long haul. It means we have to finally toss out the simple stories and face the complicated, challenging reality of what this disease truly is. [1] Yamout, B. I., & Alroughani, R. (2018). Multiple Sclerosis. Seminars in neurology, 38(2), 212–225. [2] Hauser, S. L., & Cree, B. A. C. (2020). Treatment of Multiple Sclerosis: A Review. The American journal of medicine, 133(12), 1380–1390.e2. [3] Ghasemi, N., Razavi, S., & Nikzad, E. (2017). Multiple Sclerosis: Pathogenesis, Symptoms, Diagnoses and Cell-Based Therapy. Cell journal, 19(1), 1–10. [4] Galota, F., Marcheselli, S., De Biasi, S., Gibellini, L., Vitetta, F., Fiore, A., Smolik, K., De Napoli, G., Cardi, M., Cossarizza, A., & Ferraro, D. (2025). Impact of High-Efficacy Therapies for Multiple Sclerosis on B Cells. Cells, 14(8), 606. [5] Martin, R., Sospedra, M., Rosito, M., & Engelhardt, B. (2016). Current multiple sclerosis treatments have improved our understanding of MS autoimmune pathogenesis. European journal of immunology, 46(9), 2078–2090. [6] McGinley, M. P., Goldschmidt, C. H., & Rae-Grant, A. D. (2021). Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Sclerosis: A Review. JAMA, 325(8), 765–779. [7] Kapica-Topczewska, K., Kulakowska, A., Kochanowicz, J., & Brola, W. (2025). Epidemiology of multiple sclerosis: global trends, regional differences, and clinical implications. Neurologia i neurochirurgia polska, 10.5603/pjnns.103955. Advance online publication. [8] Dobson, R., & Giovannoni, G. (2019). Multiple sclerosis - a review. European journal of neurology, 26(1), 27–40. [9] Elahi, R., Taremi, S., Najafi, A., Karimi, H., Asadollahzadeh, E., Sajedi, S. A., Rad, H. S., & Sahraian, M. A. (2025). Advanced MRI Methods for Diagnosis and Monitoring of Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Journal of magnetic resonance imaging : JMRI, 10.1002/jmri.29817. Advance online publication. [10] Jakimovski, D., Bittner, S., Zivadinov, R., Morrow, S. A., Benedict, R. H., Zipp, F., & Weinstock-Guttman, B. (2024). Multiple sclerosis. Lancet (London, England), 403(10422), 183–202. [11] Thompson, A. J., Baranzini, S. E., Geurts, J., Hemmer, B., & Ciccarelli, O. (2018). Multiple sclerosis. Lancet (London, England), 391(10130), 1622–1636. [12] Coclitu, C. I., Constantinescu, C. S., & Tanasescu, R. (2025). Neuroprotective strategies in multiple sclerosis: a status update and emerging paradigms. Expert review of neurotherapeutics, 25(7), 791–817. [13] Thompson, A. J., Banwell, B. L., Barkhof, F., Carroll, W. M., Coetzee, T., Comi, G., Correale, J., Fazekas, F., Filippi, M., Freedman, M. S., Fujihara, K., Galetta, S. L., Hartung, H. P., Kappos, L., Lublin, F. D., Marrie, R. A., Miller, A. E., Miller, D. H., Montalban, X., Mowry, E. M., … Cohen, J. A. (2018). Diagnosis of multiple sclerosis: 2017 revisions of the McDonald criteria. The Lancet. Neurology, 17(2), 162–173. [14] Langer-Gould, A. M., Cepon-Robins, T. J., Benn Torres, J., Yeh, E. A., & Gildner, T. E. (2025). Embodiment of structural racism and multiple sclerosis risk and outcomes in the USA. Nature reviews. Neurology, 21(7), 370–382. [15] Sbardella, E., Tona, F., Petsas, N., & Pantano, P. (2013). DTI Measurements in Multiple Sclerosis: Evaluation of Brain Damage and Clinical Implications. Multiple sclerosis international, 2013, 671730.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Short, Brisk Walks Could Help You Live Longer Than Long, Slow Strolls
The speed of your steps could make a significant difference in adding years to your life, according to a new study. Researchers led by a team from Vanderbilt University in the US analyzed the physical activity of 79,856 adults in 12 US states, comparing links between time spent walking slowly, time spent walking quickly, and eventual cause of death (where applicable) across an average follow-up period of almost 17 years. The data showed that those people who spent at least a quarter of an hour each day walking briskly were significantly less likely to die during the study period, especially from cardiovascular disease. What makes the findings particularly useful is they're based on a sample that includes people typically underrepresented in walking studies like this: the cohort was predominantly made up of low-income and Black individuals, who are often more likely to live in impoverished areas and less likely to have access to safe walking spaces. Related: "Our research has shown that fast walking as little as 15 minutes a day was associated with a nearly 20 percent reduction in total mortality, while a smaller reduction in mortality was found in association with more than three hours of daily slow walking," says epidemiologist Wei Zheng, from Vanderbilt University "This benefit remained strong even after accounting for other lifestyle factors and was consistent across various sensitivity analyses." The researchers categorized slow walking as walking the dog, or walking around at work. To qualify for the faster walking linked to the reduction in the risk of death, it had to be something like climbing stairs or walking briskly as part of an exercise routine. While the study isn't comprehensive enough to show direct cause and effect, the drop in mortality risk is significant enough to strongly suggest some kind of link, and the researchers think the benefits that aerobic exercise brings to heart health is key. Fast walking makes the heart work harder, improving cardiovascular health. Burning calories can also help people stick to a healthy weight. "While the health benefits of daily walking are well established, limited research has investigated the effects of factors such as walking pace on mortality, particularly in low-income and Black/African-American populations," says Zheng. One of the reasons that researchers are so keen to promote walking as a way of staying healthy is that it's just about the simplest exercise out there: most of us can do it, without any special equipment, and it's relatively easy to roll into a daily routine (try parking a little further away from work, for example). "Public health campaigns and community-based programs can emphasize the importance and availability of fast walking to improve health outcomes, providing resources and support to facilitate increased fast walking within all communities," says epidemiologist Lili Liu, from Vanderbilt University. The research has been published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. Related News 5 Things You Ought to Know Before Buying Supplements There's One Simple Method to Reduce Alcohol Intake, Scientists Say, And It Works Untested Peptide Injections Are Being Sold as 'Next-Gen Biohacks' Solve the daily Crossword
