Algebra Project takes dead aim at math literacy

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Saturday, March 10, 2001

Algebra Project takes dead aim at math illiteracy

By KAREN E. SEGRAVE

PINE BLUFF -- Robert Moses knows struggle. Rural Mississippi in the 1960s could be a dangerous place, hostile to change, and Moses was a freedom rider working in the thick of it to register black voters for the first time.

Now older and grayer, Moses is again riding for change. This time it's about helping children develop better math skills.
This time it's about algebra.

In a school cafeteria jammed with pupils, laughing is heard, drumming is practiced and a rap breaks out about prime numbers, integers and algebra.

"God split the numbers down to prime 'em, but he never said you couldn't rhyme 'em," the students sing, each time listing another of the 25 prime numbers between one and a hundred. Moses' Algebra Project is finding a home in Arkansas.
"All right, stop. Hammer time!" said one boy, echoing the words of pop star M.C. Hammer, calling an end to another game.
Sitting at long cafeteria tables, pupils were visibly excited about math. The whoops and hollers of children at play were punctuated by brief moments of nearly complete silence as the pupils' brains swiftly made abstract computations.
The goal of the Algebra Project is to leave no one behind.

It's "like guerrilla warfare" against math illiteracy, Moses said. He crafted the approach nearly 20 years ago while working with his own children in Massachusetts public schools.

"How do people in the bottom get in the mix?" asks Moses, author of Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, which chronicles his own efforts as a young man in Mississippi and the later founding of the Algebra Project.

By creating a new math literacy, as widespread as English literacy, that will grow within the black community and foster achievement.

"See how they are all communicating? They love it," said Donna Hobbs, a sixth-grade teacher at Townsend Elementary in Pine Bluff.

Hobbs and several other educators watched as more than 300 pupils from four school districts -- Eudora, Marianna, Marvell and Dollarway -- worked through abstract mathematics under the watchful eye of Moses. They came to see Moses as he stopped in Pine Bluff on a tour through the South, demonstrating the Algebra Project and working with the teachers implementing it.

Arkansas has 16 Algebra Project teachers, said Shirley Jenkins, who coordinates the program in Arkansas. The Walton Family Foundation finances the three weeks of intensive training required to be an Algebra Project teacher, Jenkins said.
The project, which started in Arkansas two years ago, involves more than 800 pupils in six school districts in southeast Arkansas, including Pine Bluff and West Helena.

That's no accident, Jenkins said. The Algebra Project in Arkansas has focused on school districts that are predominantly poor and black, she said, "the Delta."

Those also are the same areas in which students generally score low on standardized mathematics tests. Only 6 percent of Dollarway's eighth-grade pupils achieved grade-level proficiency in mathematics, according to Arkansas benchmark exams. This is compared with a 16 percent competency rate statewide. That number drops to 5 percent in Pine Bluff, according to the same statistics.

In his book, Moses cites a professor at the University of Arkansas at Monticello who said about 80 percent of freshmen must take remedial math, for which they cannot get credit, before taking college-level mathematics.

The Algebra Project might be the solution, several teachers said Thursday.
"Learning is taking place," said Dana Scott, a fifth-grade teacher from Eudora. "[The Algebra Project] gets everyone involved. Everybody has to play a part. When I started it, it's like they just woke up."

In order to succeed, you have to develop the abstract thinking that is bred by algebra as well as the understanding of the process that allows for improvisation, Moses said.

"Michael Jordan is a good role model. Don't get me wrong. But he's up there," Jenkins said, an unreachable icon. "He's not down here. They need someone they can see."

The Algebra Project is a hands-on mathematical teaching tool. Using concrete examples, pupils show teachers they know how math is used and how it relates, Hobbs said.

In her classroom, Hobbs, like other Algebra Project teachers, requires her pupils to answer all questions in complete sentences using proper grammar. Teaching language, usually the domain of English teachers, is as much a part of the Algebra Project as the math itself, Hobbs said.

"We take these kids out of the role of receiving and put them in the role of participating," Jenkins said. "We need to teach them that it's all right to 'get your lesson on,' " Jenkins said.

Mentoring is also an important part of the project, developing leaders among pupils who can teach younger children themselves.

"What I'm so impressed by is how the young black men are involved and excited. Do you know what kind of strong example that is?" Hobbs said.

Moses knows.
He lives by that example.