Clarkston High School math teachers are going beyond the numbers

Two math teachers at Clarkston High School are hoping a new Algebra 2 curriculum will help all students regardless of what their future with the subject will be.

Chris Baldus is in his fourth year teaching in Clarkston but has been teaching for 15 years at other schools in Asotin and Kendrick. Cindy Mendenhall has been teaching for 17 years in Clarkston. Both are algebra teachers using a new curriculum for the state of Washington and have received a grant for training on how to implement the material.

Washington adopted Algebra 2 to help modernize what’s taught in the classroom and create consistency with all the school districts in the state.

Teachers from across the state met to work on the new curriculum to be more consistent and relevant for all students whether they were learning in Seattle or Clarkston. The curriculum also gives teachers the ability to modify it to individual classrooms and students.

Teachers were part of the writing process for the curriculum and some schools, like Clarkston, signed on as pilot schools to use the new curriculum.

Baldus was approached by Clarkston High Principal Doug LaMunyan to see if was interested in working on the new curriculum. Baldus then became part of the writing process with 15 other teachers in the state and then the school district began piloting the program.

The Clarkston School District is in the second year of the implementation of the curriculum. The first year, the district was using it as a pilot program. The curriculum is still being written but is now in the editing and revision stage.

Baldus has other experience in writing curriculum, which he used to do for a private company. He enjoyed his previous experience, so he wanted to be a part of the process for the new state material.

“I like math a lot and writing math curriculum is its own outlet of creativity, as creative as a math person can be,” Baldus said.

The curriculum itself is online for teachers, not for students. The teachers have access to the online version and can print off what they need. Baldus said the curriculum doesn’t exist as a physical textbook and might only exist in digital form. Teachers can print off booklets for themselves or their students as needed from the digital version if they need a physical copy.

Mendenhall said the current version is convenient because it can be edited. Teachers can give input to what worked and what didn’t. Some of those changes have already been made, like splitting one unit into two from last year.

Eventually the curriculum will be completed and it will be available to teachers on the state website. Training for teachers has been funded through 2024-2025, which marks the end of the state’s grant. For now teachers collaborate during training twice a year, and then there’s a discussion board to help teachers with the process.

Last year, Baldus was the only teacher at Clarkston High using the new curriculum. This year he’s working with Mendenhall and he’s enjoyed having a teaching partner to brainstorm and bounce ideas off of.

Mendenhall wasn’t teaching Algebra 2 last year, and now it’s her first year teaching in the program. She’s taught Algebra 2 before using different curricula, but is glad she has Baldus to work with because it’s a different approach from other curricula.

“We (teachers) think we need to build all the little baby skills and then teach a concept where this kind of goes backwards,” Mendenhall said. “A little bit of, give them the main idea, the real world picture, and then we analyze ‘What made it do that? What’s this? How did that happen?’ And maybe build some of the curiosity around learning the little baby steps for the bigger problem.”

Mendenhall said the new approach is often the opposite of how teachers have traditionally taught, but newer teaching methods use this method.

“Trying to transition to be a more modern teacher is a little bit of a challenge but you’ve got to reverse your way of thinking and draw in a lot of different pieces to hopefully engage your students and make those big ideas relevant to their real world, not just a real world situation,” Mendenhall said.

Those can be like relating it to finances or finding a fun activity like launching pumpkins, which the Clarkston students have done. Those methods make it realistic and then the teachers can show them the math steps to get there. It’s part of a trend in education toward student-centered teaching that presents the concepts to students and then they think on it and ask questions.

“Today’s student is so used to being able to figure out what they want to figure out that they seem to thrive more when they’re driving the train,” Baldus said. “They’re directing where we go and we’re making sure we get to the right destination versus, ‘I stand in the front of the room and tell them things.’”

The student-centered approach also helps students ask big questions of how it relates to their lives. Baldus said that algebra is a tricky class because for some students it’s their last math class, but for other students it’s the foundation of the math they’ll use in the future. So the class needs to give both sets of students what they need.

Baldus said previously the class served the students who were continuing on to calculus really well and gave them what they needed to learn and build on. But it didn’t serve the other students as well. With the new curriculum Baldus said the writers thought about what math all students need to know, not just the students continuing on to calculus.

“It’s all about connecting to the real world to understand those big ideas,” Mendenhall said, instead of repetition and story problems that don’t connect to the real world.

Then that lesson will be backed up with practice and repetition.

The new approach answers the questions from students that teachers hear all the time, “When am I ever going to use this?” By answering that question first, it helps connect it to students rather than answering that at the end of the lesson.

Baldus said that for some students the abstract math concepts make sense to them and they can follow the lesson and appreciate what it’s trying to teach. But other students want to know a specific way the math concept can be used in their lives.

The materials in the curriculum are designed acknowledging that all students have access to the big ideas, then by showing students the big ideas, teachers can fill in the smaller details of how to get to the big idea.

“Sometimes the big idea gets lost because you’re stuck on the details,” Mendenhall said.

Combining the curriculum with the student-centered approach that Baldus and Mendenhall use allows the teachers to modify pieces of the material to fit what their students need. The method not only seems to be working for the teachers but also the students.

“I see an increase in engagement in students in math class,” Baldus said. “I think they feel like the math they’re learning is more relevant to their future ahead of them.”

While the COVID-19 pandemic has made it difficult to compare test scores with the new curriculum, Baldus and Mendenhall said their students’ understanding of the math concepts has improved. Baldus has also seen more students continuing with math classes after Algebra 2.

Mendenhall said the curriculum and Algebra 2 is working to teach students to be better thinkers and analyze information in the real world. She sees part of her job as preparing kids to be better logical thinkers even if they struggle with some of the concepts. She wants students to grasp the big picture concepts that apply to those real world situations.

“None of us know what jobs any of these kids are going to have,” Mendenhall said.

So in her view, modernizing the curriculum also means making students better thinkers.

“The big ideas here are: Math is relevant to us no matter what, and how is that changing as our future is changing?” Mendenhall said.

Brewster may be contacted at kbrewster@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2297.