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Poland McKinley math enrichment has "grown and grown and grown," principal says
POLAND
The first bell doesn’t ring until 8:25 a.m., but dozens of students at McKinley Elementary already were sitting at their desks, hard at work at 7:45 a.m. Thursday.
And that’s exactly where they wanted to be.
“They love it. They absolutely love it,” said Pam Yost, a sixth-grade math teacher at McKinley, about the school’s Math 24 Club.
Math 24 is just one of several clubs that are part of the school’s math enrichment program, coordinated and partly funded by the McKinley Elementary Parent Teacher Organization.
“It has grown and grown and grown, and it’s catching on,” said Principal Ed Kempers of the program.
Much of it is centered around preparing for mathematics competitions.
For example, a group of about 30 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders gathered Thursday — as they do every Thursday before school — to practice for MathCounts, an annual team competition hosted by Youngstown State University.
“It’s taking what they learn in the classroom and applying it to problem-solving and real-world scenarios,” said Bruce Daley, the team’s coach.
Helping kids develop problem-solving skills is the goal of many of the programs.
“They learn that problem-solving can be done more than one way to come up with the same solution. To me, that is the best part,” Yost said of Math 24, which is a card-based competition where players have to come up with the number 24 using four given numbers.
MathCounts, as well as Math 24, have been available at McKinley for many years, but Kempers said what has changed in recent years is the coordination of the math programs and the interest level from students.
“It’s never been like this,” he said. “We have kids that want to learn. They don’t look at it like work.”
The school now has: the Math League, an annual grade-level contest; Mathematical Olympiads for Elementary and Middle Schools, a math program for beginning problem solvers; and the American Mathematics Competition 8, among other opportunities.
A big part of the expansion of math enrichment is due to the efforts of Laurie Delaney, parent of a Poland student.
A few years ago, she pushed for more math enrichment at McKinley.
“What these competitions offer are non-routine problems, problems they don’t see in the classroom,” she said.
One goal, she said, is to offer opportunities to all levels of students — those who need extra help in math, those who need to be challenged more, and those who fall somewhere in the middle, since many programs often target either struggling or advanced students, she said.
And, as a women’s studies professor and a mother of a daughter, she wants to see more girls developing their math skills.
“The math gap [between girls and boys] really starts to widen in fifth grade,” she said. “And it just gets progressively wider.”
“[Doing] anything we can do to challenge those beliefs early on, to try and keep girls confident in their ability to do math and science,” is the goal, she said.