Last year, I was invited to come to Musana Vocational High School, a component of Musana Community Development Organization, in Iganga, Uganda to work with some of the high school Math teachers. I teach math differently. My students have come to call it Woodman Math, because it is so different from the ways they have always been taught. My approach is to teach from a very tangible, tactile, hands-on approach, and to never use any formulas or shortcuts that we, as a class, have not built up from scratch so that we fundamentally know where it came from. It was this approach that I wanted to share with the MVHS teachers and students, so for 2 weeks last summer, I worked with 3 high school Math teachers, and about 250 students, in demonstrating and developing an understanding of how math could be taught using these methods. Its not that its different math, its just taught from a different perspective. It was INCREDIBLE to me to see how hungry for knowledge both the students and teachers were. I need to say that these are VERY highly skilled teachers who are indeed masters of their craft and who have a tremendous rapport with their students with a great deal of mutual respect and admiration for one another. The reception of these new ideas and strategies was overwhelmingly powerful. I had a few opportunities to demonstrate through directly teaching a few classes, but our real gains were made after school each day when I met with the teachers for another couple hours, and they just asked me for ways to demonstrate concept after concept, idea after idea. These were very rich sessions and the teachers very quickly started to get the hang of it, and began to develop their own ideas of how to incorporate some of these strategies.
We really opened up the dialog, and did everything we could in 2 weeks, but there's so much more to do.
We really opened up the dialog, and did everything we could in 2 weeks, but there's so much more to do.