I get fooled sometimes. I’m talking with students about something, and I make all kinds of assumptions based on how it works in my life, but as we talk, I begin to see that things work differently in their lives. Of course, this happens with friends and colleagues, too, but in the classroom I want to find contexts that we share, so that the math part stands out. When I start from my life to find examples of math use, I often find examples that do not speak to my students’ lives. Cooking comes to mind. For me, cooking involves reading cookbooks, deciding on a recipe, checking the cupboard, and buying what I need for the recipe. I measure nearly everything with cups and spoons, so it’s easy for me to cut a recipe in half, or double it. When I talk to students, however, or watch them cook, I find most don’t use a recipe, and they measure by eye or by feel, not by cup or by teaspoon. When I look at the way they cook, I can’t find any math; when they look at the way I cook, they don’t recognize it as real life, so math work I make up about cooking is not real life math for them. They have to understand this foreign way of operating in the kitchen before they can attempt the math problems, and the result is that I make it harder for them, not easier.
Many texts use problems taken from real life that I think have a hidden message: "Your life is a mess because you don’t know how to manage your money and I’m going to show you how." There follow endless questions about balancing a checkbook, finding the best buy, figuring out interest payments, working on commission. For students living below the poverty line, the problem is not how to budget, but how to get more money, food or other necessities. Finding out how to get an extra bag of food from the food bank, or where to go for a free dinner, or how to get some help to transport the free couch someone has offered you, are all much more efficient ways to improve your life than learning to balance a chequebook.
A participant in an on-line discussion group posted this story:
I was contracted to teach the literacy portion of an employability skills course (students were mandated to take this course through social services) and I was mandated to teach a section on budgeting. I walked into the class, and began talking about coupons, saving, budgeting, etc.— all to blank faces. I could feel the anger in the room. I went home, pondered, and then the next day, I sat myself in the back of the room, (trusting my gut instinct on this one) and said, "Who am I to talk to you about budgeting?" (I knew they envisioned me as having a good income.) I said it was them who could teach me how to budget since they did it every day of their lives—them who had to scrape by on a measly $600.00 a month. I trusted them to have the answers within themselves. I apologized for having demeaned them by talking about what they could do, rather than learning how they heck they did do it. It was transforming, to say the least, as to what happened in the room after that: they all got to work telling, not just me, but everyone there, how they did do it. We then compiled a list of helpful budget hints, and everyone was extremely happy about the learning process. ("Getting Out of the Way," an asynchronous on-line conference sponsored by Literacy BC, May 23, 2001).