At-Risk Students

I read “Problem Solving and At-Risk Students: Making ‘Mathematics for All’ a Classroom Reality”. This article is about a teacher that was used to teaching students from wealthier, more privileged families and his first year as a fifth grade teacher in an area where the majority of the population is below the poverty level presented many problems for him. I related to this article because about 60% of the students in my class get free or reduced lunch. The small town of Leslie is a poorer town.

The teacher documents a few of his greatest obstacles with the children. Some of the activities that were a snap to his previous classes were really hard for his new class to handle. I really liked the way the teacher handled the challenge that was presented to him. As Robert stated in the article, teachers often time give up on students like these because they think they are “hopeless”. This entire year Robert kept the students in mind. “Children desperately need the chance to explore, create, and resolve conflicts with one another if they are to move beyond the cycle of failure.” There are a lot of students in my class that make comments calling themselves “stupid”. I also do not see a huge amount of student involvement. There are some parents that you can tell are very involved in their child’s education and there are others that I have never met nor heard anything from. Sometimes school is all the student has for support in learning and it is so important for their teacher to give them the support that they need.

The lessons that Robert challenged his students with taught them how to work with each other and how to think critically. He built up confidence in his students by giving them small successes. “The objective of these small steps was not for the students to master the magic square but for them to experience repeated successes in problem solving. My hope was that by accumulating small successes, they would build confidence, perhaps even overconfidence, to approach more difficult problems.” I think it is very important that students feel good about themselves and their accomplishments. Robert notices on the first day of school that the students were intimidated by their math. They said things like “this is too hard” or they would just throw their pencil down and say they weren’t going to do the work. Robert realized that they didn’t believe in themselves. They quit when they were presented with a challenge. Robert turned that around and showed the students that they CAN do it. He taught them that they have the ability to think critically and to accomplish difficult tasks.