I gave the following testimony to the Ohio House Rules and Reference Committee today. Please be proactive — contact your legislators and let them know your experiences! Click here to see the video.
Good morning Chairman Huffman, Ranking Member Heard, members of the Ohio House Rules and Reference Committee, and guests. Thank you for the opportunity to share my experiences related to the issues presented in House Bill 597.
My name is Kim Yoak. To give you a brief sense of my background: from 2004 until this June, I served as the K-12 Mathematics Consultant for Stow-Munroe Falls City Schools in Summit County. In May, I earned a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction/Mathematics Education from Kent State University. I am a past president of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics and have participated in projects with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the Ohio Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation. In my position in Stow, I spent at least half of most school days in K-12 mathematics classes, working with teachers and students directly. I also led inservices with K-12 teachers on a regular basis. I am licensed in grades 7 to 12 mathematics, and when I began my career, I taught middle school mathematics for six years. I am now working independently with schools and districts to facilitate professional development for mathematics teachers and, ultimately, mathematics learning for students.
I believe that it is also relevant to this hearing to note that I graduated first in my class from Stow-Munroe Falls High School and first in my class from Bowling Green State University as an undergraduate, both with 4.00 grade point averages. At Bowling Green, my coursework included 35 hours of mathematics – all but one of the courses required for a major in pure mathematics.
With this academic background, it might seem counterintuitive that I would believe that a change from past mathematics standards is necessary. However, one of the seminal experiences of my professional life occurred during my senior year mathematics methods class at Bowling Green. We were exploring how to simplify an expression like (2x + 3) times (x – 6); you may recall “FOIL” from your Algebra I class. We were thinking about and representing this process visually, in a way that connected abstract concepts to concrete objects. (As my mother has always said when she doesn’t understand a math concept, “Draw me a picture.”) Even though I had learned rote procedures for this process in eighth grade and used these procedures throughout high school and college, this was the first time that I realized that they rely on exactly the same principles as whole number multiplication and what I knew as the standard algorithm for multiplication. I had never, even as an A-student in mathematics, seen this incredibly important and useful connection between visual and algebraic representations until this point – because it had never been part of the content goals in any of my classes. As the mathematics consultant in Stow-Munroe Falls, I helped many parents at family math nights to understand this same idea, and I would hear gasps and “ohs” around the room as they saw, for the first time, the “structure” that connects “FOIL” to whole number multiplication. Such connections and the search for “structure” are prominent throughout the Common Core mathematics standards.
When Ohio began work on a new set of standards in the summer of 20091 under the leadership of the Ohio Department of Education, I served on the Advisory Board as the representative of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics. During this time, I was able to offer direct feedback on the drafts of the standards that the writing team was producing, and I saw changes made as a result. When, in late 2009, Ohio chose to join 47 other states in creating a common set of mathematics and language arts standards, the work that had been done in Ohio directly contributed to the collaboration among these states. Then, in the spring of 2010, when the draft of the Common Core State Standards was released for public comment, I was able to offer input in two ways: first, through the official Ohio Department of Education response that was written based on meetings with the original Ohio standards writing and advisory teams, and second, through a response written by the executive board of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Since the Common Core State Standards were adopted in Ohio in 2010, our school district has been purposefully and diligently preparing for the full transition to these standards. Our kindergarten teachers have been teaching the standards for four years in order to prepare our students from day one to meet this rigorous set of goals for student learning, followed in successive years by our first, second, and third grade teachers. During the past school year, all of our mathematics classes were taught using only the Common Core State Standards, and our teachers have spent a multitude of hours studying the standards and developing lessons, units, and assessments in order to enact them. And the standards are rigorous – I am not aware of a single teacher in our district who feels that the standards expect too little of students. Our teachers, do, however, believe that these goals, particularly in connection with the eight Standards for Mathematical Practice which are vital to successful mathematics learning, are well organized across the grades, thus supporting the development of problem-solving skills, reasoning, the ability to justify and critique ideas, mathematical precision, and real understanding for all students. In classrooms, I hear first graders talking about “persevering” through math problems. I see third and fourth graders explaining and understanding U.S. standard algorithms for computation. I see fifth and sixth graders proving why the answers to fraction story problems make sense. I see eighth graders discussing slope and what it means in the context of real situations as well as on graphs and in tables and equations. I hear many teachers saying that they wish they had “had the chance to learn mathematics like this, because it would have made so much more sense” to them. I am so proud of our students and teachers for their deep engagement with the Common Core State Standards. And I wonder how many fewer adults in the general population would have such a strong distaste for mathematics if they had also had this kind of learning experience. One of our kindergarten teachers, Amanda Cargioli, shared this reflection with me: "I never knew my Kindergarten students were capable of so much until the Common Core forced me to really ‘challenge’ them. They went from the expectation of only counting forward and backward from 0-10 with our old state standards to skip counting, counting up to 100, adding and subtracting, and understanding tens and ones with Common Core. We were scared it would all be too hard, when in reality the children took off and surprised us all with the higher level thinking skills they were actually capable of once we raised our standards."
Now, the citizens of Ohio – particularly, you as our representatives – have the opportunity once again to decide what kind of mathematics learning will occur in our elementary and secondary classrooms. I ask you to consider our new kindergartners, who will graduate in 2027 and enter the world and the work force. Give them the opportunity to become well-rounded mathematical thinkers who can make connections, reason, and appreciate and apply all of the facets of mathematics that most of us never experienced as students. Give them the opportunity to meet and to learn from the worthwhile challenges of the Common Core.
Thank you very much for your time, your consideration, your leadership, and your support of mathematics education in Ohio.
1 This date should actually be 2008 (corrected during the hearing).
