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Teaching Secrets: Don't Cripple With Compassion

By Ellen Berg

Late last month, my teaching colleagues and I got to participate in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ national conference here in San Diego. We moved one of our teacher workdays so teachers could attend because our principal did the math (so to speak) and found that it was cheaper to send the entire staff on a professional development day than it was to send the six teachers who asked to go and hire subs for the two days they’d be gone. Pretty smart.

We are working on creating a constructivist math program at our school, and our philosophy is that everyone, not just the math teachers, has a perspective that will help us revamp our program. So, even though I am an English teacher, I went along and looked forward to learning.

I attended many great sessions and came away with ideas for my own content area as well as math. I was most excited by NCTM’s process standards that outline the critical thinking required to make meaning of math instead of mimicry as is...