Math class for 5 and 6 year olds. 

“Are you ready for the story problem?”

The children, seated on the floor, look at the screen. 

“Chloe has 12 heart stickers, says the teacher, “she gave 7 of them to her friends. How many stickers does Chloe have left?”

He reads it a second time. A girl near me says in a deep slow voice: “This is going to be hard.” 

He starts by asking about the concept, not jumping right to the answer. “Is she going to have more or fewer heart stickers?”

The majority think that there will be fewer. They know it’s a take-away problem. 

“I’m going to be interested seeing how you show this on paper,” Ricardo tells them. The children remain sitting until he hands them their individual paper. Once in hand, they pop up and head to their desks. Some of them get cardboard trifolds, probably to help with their attention. The boy across from me is hardly visible over his trifold, I see the top of his head down to his eyebrows. On the outside of the trifold there’s a big picture of two students sitting at desks, smiling back at me. Under them it says “My Office.” 

He sits up very straight so he can see me. “I know the answer,” he confides in a whisper. I give him what I hope is an affirming smile. The teacher stops by and gives him a hint. So maybe he doesn’t quite know the answer … yet. 

A colleague of mine in middle school was very interested in the “power of yet,” the mindset that we will be able to learn something new, but we might not be there quite yet. It’s Carol Dweck, perhaps, her growth mindset, the notion that there is a whole lot of stuff we can’t do, not until we work at it a bit. We can’t do stuff until we can do stuff, it’s our effort that gets us there. I can’t figure this out … yet. 

An aide in the classroom, in a light brown wool hat and brown plaid shirt, asks the teacher how much she can help students. She doesn’t want to give them the answer, but she wants to scaffold a bit. The teacher says to go for it, she can help, of course, So she sits down and works with students at the corner table. She asks them questions. I’m reminded of a metaphor I’ve used in the past from the sport of curling, the one where one player sends a heavy stone down the ice and two other players sweep the ice in front of the stone, trying to influence how far the stone will go and how much curve (the “curl” of curling) the stone has. The teacher aide is doing the sweeping here, after the student has thrown the stone. She sweeps in such a way that the stone might head in the right direction.

Another student comes to get help from the aide. “How do you make a minus?” “Minus is just a line, like this.” The student looks satisfied with the answer. She returns to her seat, behind her own tri-fold with the My Office picture. A moment later the teacher calls all the students back to the classroom rug. At one end he has an easel with a large block of white paper, prepared with the same word problem. “Chloe had 12 heart stickers. She gave seven of them to her friend. How many stickers does Chloe have left?

“We don’t have too much time, but we have enough time to talk about our strategies.”

He rereads the question a second time, then drawing three squares, he maps out how the students will respond. Three squares for three important numbers, one in each box. He puts an equal sign between the second and third box. 

“Now. What number will be in the first box?” 

“12!” He writes 12 in the first box.

He steers them into what sort of problem this is. It’s take-away, the students tell him. He fills in a 7 in the second box and then adds a minus sign between the first two boxes. Then he calls up a student who he knows has a good strategy. 

“What color do you want me to write your strategy in?” The student comes to the front and presents her work. She has drawn all 12 hearts. That seems like a very good strategy. She carefully counts them now to make sure. 12 indeed. The teacher repeats the counting as he draws on the easel, the students count along with him. 

“Why did you draw 12 hearts?”

“Because Chloe had 12 hearts. So I drew them. Then I crossed out seven hearts.”

The teacher checks that the other students used this strategy. It looks like most of them did. After looking at her paper and thinking for a long time, the student explains what she did next. The teacher waits patiently. Encourages her a little. She has gotten shy in front of everyone else.

In a whisper she says, “And then she only has 5 left. I just counted the hearts.”

“Let’s count again together, class. This time in Spanish. Uno, dos, tres … Alright, cool! He smiles at the student in front. Success! “How would you like to be celebrated?

The “Oreo cookie clap,” she says quietly, but a bit louder than before.

The students, the teacher, and the aide take a pretend Oreo from their pocket, twist it open, lick one side, lick the other side, and then they slap it back together with a clap. The sweet, sweet sound of success.