FILLMORE : State Rewards Schools for Aid on Math Text

Students at Fillmore High School may get new hand calculators this year and math teachers may be able to attend a few extra conferences as a result of work done several years ago by instructors from the school’s math department.

The state Department of Education is distributing $38,000 in book royalties to Fillmore Unified and 17 other California school districts that allowed their high school teachers to take off work to help write a mathematics text.

Each of the districts will receive $2,112, with the stipulation that the money be used by their high school math departments for supplies such as calculators or teacher training.

“It’s not a lot of money,” said Walter Denham, the head of math education for the state Department of Education. But, he said, “in America, money speaks. It’s acknowledging that districts did support the development” of the math text and the state’s new guidelines for teaching ninth-grade math.

From 1988 to 1991, a group of teachers called upon by state school officials worked weekends and on one school day every two months to develop a course for high school freshmen who are not ready for college preparatory math.

The text that grew out of this effort, “Investigating Mathematics: An Interactive Approach,” was published by a commercial textbook company in 1992 and is being used in classrooms across the country, Denham said.

The teachers’ work was also incorporated into the state’s new guidelines for basic ninth-grade math classes.

The new ninth-grade math course tries to engage students with realistic math problems, he said. For instance, students are asked to imagine they have $1,000 to invest. Then, they are asked to choose among savings accounts, bonds and certificates of deposit that offer different interest rates.