Campus Voices
Lower School
When I first found my way to my new classroom in August, I was struck by the twists and turns, and the nooks and crannies, that give the Markham building its decidedly unclassroom-like personality. The math classroom in the back of the second floor feels more like a converted apartment than the industrial concrete or brick schoolrooms in which I spent many of my years teaching. How appropriate, I thought, the math department lives above the art department. This is the perfect environment to discover that math, just like art, is, at its most beautiful and satisfying, a discipline of creative problem solving.
Fifth and sixth graders at BB&N have the advantage of learning math in small, cooperative groups of approximately ten students. This allows teachers to set up an environment where students have the opportunity to delve into complex and challenging problems that help them construct meaningful understanding of mathematical concepts. Although many of us think of math as a linear process of learning algorithms and procedures and then applying the procedures to real world problems, higher level problem solving involves making sense out of complex problems and developing methods with which to solve them. With this notion in mind, our curricula allows the math teachers to be guides for students while they broaden their creative problem solving skills and comprehend mathematical algorithms at a deeper level. Ultimately, I think this gives our students an advantage when they take more advanced math and science courses.
I am reminded daily of how lucky I am to be able to teach at a school like BB&N, where it is clear every place I look—in classrooms, hallways and faculty spaces—that everyone here not only has the best interests of children in mind, but the school has committed its resources to ensure that the students have everything they need in order to succeed. The fifth and sixth graders that I have the pleasure to teach approach school as true students. They come into class ready to learn, eager to work with each other and seemingly excited to launch themselves into uncharted territory.
I have taught at several different kinds of schools—public, charter and independent—and it has been my experience that this approach to learning in the middle grades is not the norm. In fact, I think it is the environment created by the homeroom teachers at BB&N that foster a feeling of community among children from an early age. Students here not only have the opportunity to shine and show their brilliance, they are also comfortable taking risks and making mistakes—and in this way, the arduous path of learning is eased a little.
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