Joi A Spencer

It's hard to forget Donovon. He sat in the far right corner of his sixth grade math classroom facing the wall. He was quiet and listened to the teacher's class discussions and lectures, even though he could not actually see her or engage with her. He was deemed too far behind to work with the other kids and was assigned computation problems out of an old fourth-grade textbook. On occasion, I would sit next to him and encourage him work on the problems assigned to his classmates. Like the equation x+3= 7. I gave him a series of simpler problems, talking about all the ways one could arrive at 7 when adding, and I discussed for what seemed to be the entire class period why the letter x was in the problem in the first place. And then the light went on. He realized not only what x meant, but also why it must equal 4. Through mathematics instructional practices centered on student thinking and sense-making versus rule-giving and recall, Donovon was able to understand the equation. Donovon was not missing out on much. Though they worked from a sixth-grade textbook, his classmates often copied long columns of problems from the board solving them with predetermined steps. On this day they were told to subtract 3 from each side of the equation. No explanation was given for why the method worked and students spent the entire class session rotely completing nearly identical problems. We have all heard the arguments that repetition is essential to math success. Yet, only two percent of the sixth-graders at Donovon's school were scoring at or above proficiency on their state math exams. Less than three miles from Donovon's school, Douglass Middle School sat in the middle of a residential community in South East Los Angeles. Each morning when I drove there on the freeway, I could not help but notice that the majority of the cars were going in the opposite direction. As happy as I was to drive on a virtually empty freeway in Los Angeles, I understood that the scarcity of cars moving in my direction signaled something disturbing about the nature of life and opportunities in the Douglass community. On the route between my freeway exit and the school, the men (both young and aged) standing around on sidewalks, wandering the streets, and sometimes stretched out on bus stop benches told the story all too well. Unemployment in this community was among the highest in the nation, and the often resultant ills of poverty, incarceration, and drug abuse had now taken their places. Math class at Douglass left me dreaming for more.