3 days ago
- Science
- 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.'
