Academic preparation and education

Rosalie Pitts: Raise your hand. Raise your hand if you want to tell me how many days in a whole school year. Stephanie?

Rosalie Pitts [closeup]: Math is something we use every day, all the time. We don’t even realize how much we use it.

Rosalie Pitts: You’re going to be working with your partner. Now are all of these pieces the same size?

Rosalie Pitts [closeup]: As a teacher, the first class I took, I was really intrigued with some of these new ways of thinking about things and able to discover new concepts myself. Oh, I didn’t realize that. I never told my students that.

Rosalie Pitts: You are going to find pieces that are the same, that are equal.

Jody Priselac [closeup]: It is true that many teach the way they were taught and so it’s kind of breaking that cycle and we can’t keep teaching the way we were 50 years ago when we’ve learned so much more. And that’s the key piece.

Rosalie Pitts: Y equals what?

Rosalie Pitts [closeup]: Probably the biggest change between what we’re doing now through the UCLA math programs and the way I was taught is that years ago a lot of it was straight rote. There may have been a little bit of explanation but mostly it was rote. If we could snap out that answer, nobody seemed to care if we really understood what we were doing.

Rosalie Pitts: See if you can help her find something that is the same as the brown. You let her.

Rosalie Pitts [closeup]: The idea that yellow is equal to yellow, that is a big algebraic understanding because we’re looking at identity, something is the same as itself. We’re looking at something can be the same as two other things. Or, as you noticed, some of them lined up four or five to be the same as one of the larger blocks. So this is discovery for them.

Student: Purple equals blue.

Jody Priselac [closeup]: To see the excitement, I mean just watching Rosalie with her students and seeing how engaged the children are and how much they want to participate and how much they were learning. I mean it’s tremendous.

Rosalie Pitts: See how many different things you can find that are equal.

Jody Priselac [closeup]: We did see a bump in scores and we saw a range, some from 10 to some up to 30 points.

Rosalie Pitts [closeup]: We want them to be able to come back later and say, “Oh, yes, this is how we find out this. I don’t have to think what was the formula my third grade teacher told me or my fifth grade teacher. This is what I understand. Therefore, I know I do this and this and this.” My goal, take them as far as I can, help them understand as much as possible.

Rosalie Pitts: Seven, eight, nine, ten. How many in here?

Students: Ten.

Rosalie Pitts: Ten? How many groups of ten?

Students: Two.

Rosalie Pitts: Two.

[END VIDEO]