Credit: Adam Billyeald
From the September 2006 issue of Seed:
In 1982, when Maisha Moses was in middle school, her father Bob became her math teacher. Her public school didn't offer algebra, so Bob, who had studied the philosophy of math at Harvard, decided that he was going to teach the subject himself. Maisha was mortified. "I had the usual adolescent reaction," she remembers. "I was just so embarrassed that my dad was there." But her father wouldn't relent. Walking in to Maisha's Cambridge, MA classroom that first day, Maisha recalls, Moses assumed that teaching a few kids about quadratic equations would be relatively easy.
It wasn't. Moses quickly realized that most students couldn't grasp the basic concepts of algebra. "That first year was tough," Maisha says. "Your dad is teaching your friends, and your friends don't get what he's talking about. I mean, nobody likes learning algebra." Bob, too, could see the students were hopelessly lost. But he realized that the problem wasn't algebra, and it wasn't Maisha and her friends. It was the way they were being taught algebra.
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Moses spent the next five years developing a completely new curriculum. He called it the Algebra Project. Instead of confronting students with abstract equations, Moses took them out into the real world, traveling around Boston in search of experiences that could demonstrate the practical uses of math. A ride on the T became a lesson in coordinate graphing and negative numbers. Neighborhood landmarks stood in for integers. When Moses taught students about displacement, he had them measure the dimensions of their own bodies. The first rule of Moses' math class was that students always had to "participate in a physical event."
His unconventional methods changed the way the students felt about math. "When you take a trip on the subway and learn about algebra," Maisha says, "what you're really doing is developing a new way of thinking. Instead of just trying to memorize these strange equations, you're busy relating the math to your own experiences. All of a sudden, you find math spilling over into other areas of your life."
Before long, the Algebra Project curriculum began to spread. Lynne Godfrey, Maisha's old math teacher, was one of the first to try out the new approach. "It was just astounding the results we were getting," Godfrey remembers. "We would take the Red Line, and then turn the subway stops into symbolic representations. It didn't feel like math class, which was a good thing. For the first time, every kid in the class understood the concepts of algebra. The students retained the knowledge. They were really learning."
Follow-up studies have confirmed the benefits of Moses' experiential curriculum. 92% of Algebra Project graduates in Cambridge went on to upper-level math courses, twice the rate of students not in the program. Similar results were reported at middle schools in San Francisco. Before the Algebra Project came to Lanier High School in Jackson, MS, it wasn't uncommon for every student in a math class to fail the state math exam. After just two years, the pass rate among its graduates was 55%.