The Rally Call Blog

Note: This story was submitted to the Rally Call Blog through the Center for Civic Engagement by Academic Skills Advancement Mathematics Instructor Jodi Pope-Pfingston.

During the last three years as an Academic Skills Advancement (ASA) mathematics instructor at Ivy Tech Community College, I have searched for methods to help my students achieve a higher level of confidence, experience, and positive feelings about mathematics and their education in general. Many of my students are new to the college environment, and quite often are the first members of their family to even attempt to go beyond high school. For this reason, I felt that anything I could do to help encourage and support them during this crucial period would have long-lasting positive results. I felt that an appropriate service learning project would meet these needs perfectly.

In the Fall 2006 semester I formed a partnership with Cindy Creek and Mike Love, the two team-teachers of a combined-age first and second grade class of approximately forty-five students at Rogers Elementary. Together we worked out plans to have the students in one of my Math 044 sections work alongside their first and second grade class to create a Math Fair which would be attended by all 350+ students at the school.

Mike and Cindy visited my class near the beginning of the semester to discuss the needs of Elementary math students and their goals for the project as well as to answer any questions my students had. With this information in hand, my students went on to create activities for the math fair, consisting of booths which they would run with the help of Mike and Cindy’s students.

The end result accomplished all of my goals and more. My students were excited and pleased to rise to the occasion, and all of them gained confidence, valuable experience, and a new perspective of the value and importance of mathematics and education. Perhaps more importantly, they had fun learning and teaching math to others while contributing something valuable to their community.

At the close of our project, each of my students was asked to respond to a handful of questions about their experience. The following is a selection of quotes from those responses:

1. “It makes me proud to be a student who helped contribute to such a great cause.”

2. “I feel this experience helped me better understand that math is truly important. I also felt that I learned some fun ways that in the future I’ll be able to teach my kid fun ways to learn math so they won’t get the idea that math isn’t important.”

3. “It was good to see that I could explain the math problems and concepts in a way the children could understand. This made me realize that I do understand the concepts we have been learning in class well enough to educate another person.”

4. “I enjoyed being on the teaching side of mathematics. It was definitely an experience that I will not forget.”

5. “The math fair helped me realize how important math skills really are, and also how students are learning them at such a young age. It was surprising to see that some of the students were extremely intelligent and could get the answers to math problems faster than I could.”

6. “Math is something you will use for the rest of your life and learning it well as a child is better for the future. The project has changed my view on being a student, because before I thought school was boring and not fun. The children in the Creek/Love class showed me that learning never has to be boring.”

For further information on this project or the plans for the Second Annual Rogers Math Fair, e-mail jpope@ivytech.edu.

-Jodi Pope-Pfingston
ASA Mathematics Instructor
Ivy Tech Community College - Bloomington