Granada Hills Teacher Honored : To Sum It Up, She’s No. 1 in Math

Sheila Berman has been teaching math to San Fernando Valley junior-high students for 23 years and has weathered many of the field’s instructional vogues.

There was the age of the “no-questions-asked” method of teaching, with its emphasis on memorization and rote learning. Then came the “new math” era, which tried to teach youngsters mathematical theories and concepts at the same time they learned to multiply and divide.

The math buzzwords now are “problem solving” and “application,” two theories evolved from the new math and ones that teachers hope will help students learn that math principles can be applied to everyday situations.

No matter what the trend, Berman has used the same warm, straightforward manner to share her enthusiasm for math with her students at Patrick Henry Junior High School in Granada Hills, colleagues say.

Presidential Award

These qualities led Berman to be named one of the nation’s 50 outstanding math teachers as part of the 1985 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Math teaching. One teacher is named from each state.

“We were looking for evidence that the person is totally committed to the successful teaching of mathematics,” said Joe Hoffman, a mathematics instruction consultant to the California State Board of Education and one of the judges on the national panel that reviewed finalists for the awards.

“We wanted people so committed that they seem to set everything else aside for the success of the kid. We also looked to see if they were concerned for their colleagues,” Hoffman said. “And the one thing about Sheila is that she feels very strongly about getting the human element in. That’s in contrast to a lot of math teachers, who are more interested in stuffing information into a kid’s head like he was some kind of computer.”

Numbers Into Art

For example, in Berman’s eighth-grade basic math class, students were given a chance to see how numbers can translate into art. After they had completed a table with designs substituting for numbers, Berman passed out colored pencils and had them fill in the designs until patterns formed.

Berman is the first woman from California to win the presidential math teacher award. She is also the first junior high teacher to win. Along with the accolades, Berman will receive $5,000--which must be donated to the school’s math department--and a free trip to Washington to meet with other top math and science teachers.

This is not the first time Berman’s teaching accomplishments have been honored. She is a past president of the California Math Council, and fellow Los Angeles school district math teachers recently gave her an award for teaching excellence. Berman also was co-chairwoman of the state committee that revised the curriculum standards that California school districts must follow when establishing high school math courses.

‘No One Is Ever Satisfied’

Teaching math is “one of education’s toughest assignments,” said F. Joe Crosswhite, president of the National Council of Teachers of Math. “No one is ever satisfied with how our young people are doing in math.”

Berman says most teachers have to fight students’ prejudices and anxieties about math.

Girls, for example, often lose interest in math around the eighth grade. Aware of this, Berman and her colleagues discussed some of the subconscious ways teachers may contribute to the problem. They discovered that sometimes teachers give boys more time to answer a question than they give to girls, possibly because they assume that the girls don’t know the answer.

“Students’ attitudes toward math have never been good,” she said recently. “Either math really clicks for them or it is a struggle. That’s one reason why we try to show students how math relates to their everyday lives.”

Annual Competition

One way the seven-member Patrick Henry math department, which Berman chairs, tries to take math out of the textbook is through an annual schoolwide competition that encourages students to develop three-dimensional models and other projects from math concepts they have learned.

“We have to show that math is more than work sheets and computation,” Berman said.

Berman has already developed a wish list for how she would like to see the $5,000 used. She said her first priority would be to finance field trips to the Los Angeles County Museum of Science and Industry for students to see the math exhibit.

She said she would also like to see some of the money go to help finance attendance by Patrick Henry’s math teachers at conferences and other in-service workshops so they will know state-of-the-art teaching techniques.

“Those are just my thoughts,” Berman said between classes. “Our department is a family, so we’ll decide how to use the money together.”

Above all, Berman says she has a simple mission: “I want kids to like math.”