Elizabeth I. Kryszpin
My unit, “The Integration of Science and Math Through Ecosystems”, will be taught to students in fifth through eight grade. I teach remedial math to these aforementioned grades and I am at liberty to reinforce their mathematical skills in any way I see fit. I do not teach from a textbook series and I generally garner and glean materials from supplemental sources. Gathering sources appropriate for each grade and conducive to whatever the regular math teachers are teaching in their classes is a difficult task. My students come to class with a general disdain for math and a sense of boredom and frustration towards both me and the extra doses of math I am to spoon feed them. This makes my job even more difficult.
Difficulty breeds creativity and resourcefulness. I have learned that my students generally do not like and/or understand math taught and drilled to them in the standard, textbook method. Attempting to repeat this rote method in the past has left both me and the students at odds as well as at our wits’ ends.
The most successful attempts to date have been my integrations of math with other subject areas. The integrations have been fruitful because they have proven to students that math is important and essential to many aspects of their academic as well as day-to-day lives. The integration techniques have taken math out of the vacuum in which my students have experienced and grown to hate it. Teaching in Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School has also fostered the integration of math with other subject areas such as language arts, reading, writing, and social studies because of the interdisciplinary philosophy and nature.
I have not yet attempted to integrate science and math although these two subject areas are probably the most related and dependent upon each other. I ironically have a relatively extensive science background. I haven’t tried the science-math connection yet because I thought that I didn’t have the appropriate equipment to integrate the two areas successfully. I applied to the Institute to expose myself to ideas and concepts about science and more specifically, ecology, which I could easily and subtly integrate into my math-oriented classroom.
