Two new approaches to math in Mexico
Rural kids take to hands-on games immediately; technology is a harder go
Mexican students consistently receive among the lowest scores in math when ranked against other nations (see the light blue bubble dangling low in the chart below). We designed a Khan Academy pilot project to test if online world-class math instruction could improve testing results in a school in the small Mexican town of Las Varas.
I was willing to gamble that online learning was one avenue to improving student understanding of math, and I was working hard to achieve it, but I knew from experience that the use of cost-effective classroom materials like manipulatives was another.
In November 2013, when I returned to el Colegio Patria, the rural school where I’d been volunteering, I brought down counting chips, pattern blocks, ten frames and hundreds boards — all hands-on learning materials I’d come across online. I’m not a teacher, so I read what teachers had to say and followed their advice.
Mexican teachers are not trained in experiential learning, but when I brought the hands-on materials to the school, Colegio Patria’s teachers recognized their potential. We used the new materials to introduce the concepts of addition and subtraction and to painlessly practice rote learning of the times tables.
One of our most successful manipulatives was the simplest:
el palo de contar (the counting stick).
Manuel, the school caretaker and handyman, cut a long stick for each classroom, painted on the numbers from 1 to 10, and nailed the fuzzy side of a square of velcro above each of the ten numbers. The teachers cut out numbers from stiff cardboard and glued the sticky side of the velcro to the back of the cards.
The Grade 4 class groaned when I came into their room and announced we were going to practice times tables. By the end of the class, they wouldn’t let me leave without a promise to come back. Pulling numbers out of a bag and sticking them onto the counting stick had changed their minds about multiplication.
The manipulatives worked out well, which led me to high expectations for online learning. My first few weeks back at the school, I received both good news and bad. The good news came first. The bad slowly came to light.
Since I’d last been in the school, at the end of February, the computer lab had gained 8 tablets. True, it had lost 4 of its 18 desktops, but the tablets more than made up for that. I have no idea how Armida (one of the school’s two directors) raised the funds to purchase the tablets, but their arrival was good news indeed. We were now able to get a full classroom of students working on the Khan Academy site at the same time.
Another piece of good news was that Armida and Lety (her sister and fellow director) had appointed a young teacher, Maestro Alfredo, to head up the Khan Academy project. Alfredo could not then, and still can not, afford to own a computer himself, but at least he had the computer lab to work with.
When I arrived, the tablets were so new and so precious that it took all the persuasive ability I could muster to convince Armida and Alfredo to allow the kids to peel back the protective film over the glass screens. Taking the tablets out of their boxes was absolutely out of the question, so the students worked in their laps. No working outside of the box!
A third piece of good news was that Carlos Slim, Mexico’s Telmex king and the richest man in the country, had teamed up with the Khan Academy in California to translate the site into Spanish. This was a huge advance. As soon as the Khan Academy Español was up and running, Spanish speaking students everywhere would have access to the full utility of the site.
The brilliance of Salman Khan’s teaching method is that it integrates four important aspects of learning: instruction, practice, assessment and feedback. Khan Academy videos are short, clear, and, perhaps most important of all, visual. Khan uses video technology to show students how math works.
The students watch videos then practice exercises in the form of a game — winning points and earning badges. They advance toward higher levels of math instruction motivated by online rewards like the right to earn and flaunt new avatars. As soon as students log into the site, they see at a glance which concepts they know and which are going to take a little more practice.
Their instructors also know where they are, getting real time assessment of the individual performance of each of them. Instant coach data allows teachers to work 1-on-1 with students wherever they are stuck.
All that worked in English but in Spanish, up until then, the students had to find the Spanish videos in YouTube, then switch to practice exercises on the English Khan Academy site. Teacher data was unavailable.
I knew that Khan Academy Español was in a beta version, and likely to have some glitches, but the mere idea of it was motivational. Students would no longer have to toggle back and forth between YouTube in Spanish and the Khan Academy in English. The Spanish portal would allow them to watch videos, move on to the exercises, get stuck, go back to the instructional videos–-all almost as fluidly as on the English site. Their teachers would have the same student activity data as the English site and could target their help to each student individually.
Maestro Alfredo, in charge of the project, was a geography teacher. A few weeks in, Armida assigned the school’s math teacher to assist him. My next step was to train the school’s teachers and to introduce them to the Khan Academy site.
A few weeks earlier, I had contacted Enova, an ambitious educational initiative in Mexico City dedicated to bridging Mexico’s digital divide, and asked them for help. They sent us a guide mapping the Khan Academy videos to the Ministry of Education’s math curriculum.
When teacher training began, I attempted to explain, in a language I barely spoke, a concept the teachers barely understood.
I picked up new Spanish vocabulary like la red (the net), contraseña (password) and cuenta (account). I can’t say what the teachers took from it.
We were getting close. Next, Armida scheduled the hour after school in the computer lab for the Khan Academy experiment. The Grade 5 and 6 students jumped at the opportunity, all of them willing to come every day after school for the next two weeks.
We had the will; we had the computer lab; we had the kids. Online learning could begin!
It wasn’t as easy as that.
This is the 19th story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School. In the next story, the Khan Academy launch finally has some success.
The previous story explores Mexico’s love for the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Starting in the winter of 2009, Diane Douglas volunteered three years in the two-room school in the fishing village of Chacala, north of Puerto Vallarta. Since 2012, she’s been working to improve online learning at el Colegio Patria, a remarkable rural school in the poor, agricultural town of Las Varas.
