By Sherry Lehane Math in ESOL Coursebooks Did you ever start a home do-it-yourself project and suddenly realize you were in over your head? Maybe you didn’t have the carpentry skills or the right tools to do the project? This is how I felt many years ago when I attempted to teach math to my … Continue reading Making Math Meaningful in the ESOL Classroom
Pam Meader is a math consultant for TERC in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a national math trainer for LINCS. Pam is co-facilitator of the Mathematizing ESOL series serving as the math expert. She is co-author of the Hands on Math series from Walch Publishing and is a member of ANN, Adult Numeracy Network. Integrating curriculum is … Continue reading Math and ESOL, A Winning Combination
Math skills are a critical part of everyday life that contribute to academic and workforce success. For English language learners, the struggle to learn math can be complicated by language and cultural barriers. In addition, math classes are not always readily available as math is often not a part of ESOL programs. Recently, the Workforce … Continue reading Mathematizing ESOL
“Adult and Family Literacy Week” would be better named “Adult and Family Literacy and Numeracy Week!” Why? Because the ability to use mathematics in everyday life is essential to fully participating in modern life “at work, in practical everyday activities at home and beyond, as consumers, in managing our finances, as parents helping our children learn, as patients making sense of health information, as citizens understanding the world around us.”[1] Decisions we make every day depend on numeracy skills. “To make the best choices, we need to be numerate.”[2] Read more…
World Education will periodically honor outstanding adult educators. Our first featured teacher is Connie Rivera, a Connecticut adult education teacher and professional developer. We asked Connie a series of questions about her work as an adult education teacher. How did you get started in adult education? In January, 2002, I wanted to stay home with … Continue reading Teacher Appreciation: Recognizing Connie Rivera
Invert and multiply. Does this ring a bell? It probably does for most adult education math teachers because this is how we were taught to divide fractions, and this is how many of us still teach this algorithm. Does this approach to teaching fraction division work? For the most part, no, or we wouldn’t be … Continue reading Math Professional Development, or Why Invert and Multiply Doesn’t Have Any Staying Power
