Math Project a Plus for Family Equation

Math has never come easily to Linda Huerta. Huerta, a stock clerk at a Long Beach supermarket, has an especially difficult time remembering her multiplication tables. So when her 12-year-old son, Ramon, asks her for help with his sixth-grade math homework, Huerta, 34, is generally at a loss.

Miguel Moreno, 36, has a similar problem. A native of Mexico, he learned math by a method completely foreign to his two sons, Cristian, 10, and Miguel Jr., 9.

“I need help, and they need help,” said Moreno, the manager of a sewing machine shop. “If I get help, they get help.”

Attending School Together

Both parents have been getting help lately in a rather unusual way: by attending school with their kids. The program is called Family Math. And if Long Beach Unified School District officials are right in their hunch, both generations will benefit.

“The bottom line is for the children to achieve,” said Polly Strong, program specialist for the district and originator of the Family Math project in Long Beach. “But we can’t do it alone in the schools; we need the help of the family. And if the family doesn’t know how to help, we need to teach them.”

The Los Angeles County Office of Education views the Long Beach experiment as a potential model for other districts around the county.

Developed by educators at the Lawrence Hall of Science on the UC Berkeley campus in 1981, the program evolved from an earlier one designed to meet the needs of minority groups and women who seemed to be dropping out of math classes before entering high school in large numbers.

Interest in the effort was increased by the publication of studies in the early 1980s showing a national decline in student math scores. One of them--conducted by the National Commission on Excellence in Education and released in 1983--indicated an average drop of nearly 40 points in math scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test from 1963 to 1980. From 1975 to 1980, the study said, the number of remedial math courses at four-year public colleges increased by 72% to constitute one-fourth of all math courses at those institutions.

Since 1983, according to Virginia Thompson, director of the project at the Lawrence Hall of Science, the program has grown from an initial involvement of about 240 families in the Bay Area to an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 families in 20 states plus Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

And in Los Angeles County, said Ric Thomas, a math consultant for the county’s Office of Education, the idea has been “spreading like measles” ever since his office began training teachers in its methods two years ago.

During that period, Thomas said, about 100 trained teachers have offered Family Math to an estimated 3,000 families in Los Angeles, El Monte, South Whittier, Santa Monica and Santa Fe Springs.

Under Strong’s leadership, the Long Beach math program was offered for six weeks at an elementary school and junior high school last fall. This term it is being continued at Webster and Stevenson ElementarySchools and in April will be offered at Washington Junior High School.

Eventually, Strong said, she would like to see the program extended to every elementary and junior high school in the district.

The weekly classes--which in Long Beach are open only to students who have performed below average on

standardized math tests--are very informal. During one recent gathering at Webster, for example, parents and children arriving after school at the campus library were greeted by a plate of cookies.

Then the real fun began.

On one table, participants were asked to estimate what the combined ages of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington would be if they were alive today. Later the person coming closest to the answer--which turned out to be 435--received a sports book as a prize.

Other tables featured a game in which contestants competed to create

the most “valuable” sentences by using letters that had been assigned monetary value; exercises involving graphs, and a puzzle game requiring participants to complete geometric patterns by putting together cut-out shapes.

As in most elementary school math classes in California, the students were encouraged to use pocket calculators to make their computations. And as in their regular classes, they were given homework assignments. The big difference was that these assignments were more like games than work and had to be completed by their parents as well.

Although the project’s originators say they have not yet done any formal tracking to determine long-term effects, some teachers at Webster said they are already noticing changes in participating students.

“They are more eager, less inhibited and more enthusiastic,” said Courtney Gerrard, who teaches the fourth grade.

From D to C

Kristi Shelton, a fifth-grade teacher at the school, said she has one child whose grade in math has gone up one full letter--from a D to a C--as a result of participating in the program.

The student “seems a little bit happier and a little more confident,” Shelton said.

That happiness and confidence are shared, in most cases, by the parents.

“This gives me a chance to prove to my daughter that I care for the things she does in school,” said Silvia Vigil, 32, who attends the classes with her 9-year-old daughter, Maritza. “She’s proud of me, and I’m proud of her.”