Success Strategies for Teaching Struggling Math Students: Take the Pain out of Pre-Algebra

By Jim Slosson

Low-achieving math students are different than students who succeed at math. They need a different instructional approach to be successful.

Jim Slosson’s practical, humorous mixture of theory and personal stories provides you the tools to help your students get ready for Algebra I. Loaded with real-life examples of Jim’s success strategies, the book provides you with practical tips on setting a class tone, delivering instruction, creating assignments, grading, and discipline. This book will help your students learn more math while you improve the quality of your professional life.

Using success strategies, you can improve students’ math achievement by 2.5–3.0 grade levels, and you will go home earlier. Success strategies have been used in more than 150 classrooms in 50 separate districts from Western Washington to the Midwest.
Jim’s chapter on discipline should be required reading for beginning teachers—maybe some veteran teachers too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669840336

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 by Jim Slosson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/21/2024

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface by Jim Slosson

Foreword by Susan Watts-Day, PhD

Friend and Mentor

Chapter 1You got stuck with this class

What now?

Chapter 2No, I am not smarter than you are

But I have been at it way longer.

Chapter 3You need an assessment system

Grade levels are way more useful than arbitrary numbers.

Chapter 4These are the kids you’ve got

Not the ones you wish you had.

Chapter 5Make positive connections or don’t bother

The story of Tina.

Chapter 6Rows suck; circles are best

Table groups work well enough.

Chapter 7D grade, the great quality killer

I have a God-given and legal right to do crappy work.

Chapter 8Teach what you test and test what you teach

Or why did you bother?

Chapter 9Every day is a graded day

But you won’t take any papers home.

Chapter 10Learning is not an hour of the teacher talking

They aren’t listening anyway.

Chapter 11Your magic wand for grading papers

Done before the bell rings.

Chapter 12Do routine things routinely

No fuss, no muss.

Chapter 13Discipline is teaching correct behavior

Some stuff they did not tell you back in your Ed classes.

Chapter 14Communication

Shorter is sweeter—every two weeks should be enough.

Chapter 15Implementation

Cut yourself a break—the job doesn’t love you back.

Chapter 16The job doesn’t love you back, but some kids might

Your teaching schedule—your career—the payoff is more than money.

Chapter 17A strategy for state tests

If you can narrow it down to two, go ahead and guess.

Acknowledgments

You’re going to need some help too.

Illustrators

Ordering Math Lab Materials

About the Author

Am I not a swell guy?

Glossary

Appendices – Extra Stuff

Appendix A – Classroom rules

Appendix B – Math Lab/AGA interview activity

Appendix C – the one-minute multiplication test

Appendix D – sample Math Lab/AGA computational assignment

Appendix E – sample Math Lab/AGA assignment

Dedication

For Karen Eitreim who left us way too soon.

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Karen was a world traveler, a teacher, a principal, and a friend.

I’m trying to keep this book informal. It’s not a scholarly work; I guess it’s more like a how-to-do-it handbook you inherited from the old guy down the hall.

We could call it irreverent reality, a term I coined to describe my colleague, Karen Eitreim, who had a passion for kids, schools, and serious scholarship, but also knew how to laugh—after her morning latte.

Preface

My wife was right. Ouch!

Please read this first. There are a couple of things you need to know about this book.

During the year that I developed the manuscript for this book, original title: Take the Pain out of Pre-Algebra, Pat kept telling me that the success strategies for teaching math were useful at every grade level and even other subjects. She said I shouldn’t focus solely on Pre-Algebra. Before the ink was dry on the first edition, I realized that Pat was indeed correct.

Everything in this book works well with Pre-Algebra students that are more than a year behind. They improve 2.5 – 3 grade levels per year.

Everything in this book works even better in regular Algebra I and Geometry classes. Right now, about fifty, maybe sixty, percent of your kids are doing okay. The rest are struggling along and marking time. They’re sneaking peeks at their phones, dozing with their eyes open, drawing on their papers, and generally messing about. They are not listening to you. Their engagement and effort are minimal. They copy the homework from a friend. They are hoping (not working) for a D grade or maybe a C- if they’re lucky.

These are the same kids I affectionately call my chuckle heads and rascals. Now they are in your class and they’re not doing much. The success strategies will enable you to reach them in ways you never thought possible. Each of the strategies has an effect size greater than .56. If you are familiar with the work of Dr. John Hattie, you know that everything over .4 is worth doing, and contributes to student success.

Yes, you will still have a few F grades; those kids have much bigger problems than math. The D’s should go away completely. A few sophisticated slackers will manage to earn a C, but mostly your kids will earn A’s and B’s.

Bonus! You will enjoy your job more, and you will be going home about 30 minutes after the students leave.

And finally. Thank you. You are doing one of the most important jobs in America. When you are done with your career, you will leave the world a bit better than you found it, and you will hugely improve the lives of many students.

Jim Slosson February 2024 (That’s fifty-two years since I started teaching—probably longer than most of you have been alive.)

PS: Yes, I know that I tend to repeat a few key concepts several times throughout the book. The ideas are so important that they are worth repeating, and besides, it’s a habit acquired teaching high school kids for more than half a century.

Foreword

Don’t let the aw shucks style fool you

When Jim asked me if I would say a few words about his book, Taking the Pain out of Pre-Algebra, I thought he was joking. I was an abysmal math student in high school. I was a no-math student in college, and because of that, I chose to major in Secondary Education, rather than my preferred Elementary Education major. I wanted to avoid taking two required math classes. Little did I know that as a graduate student several times over, I would regret that opportunity to sharpen my math skills and overcome my math anxiety.

Over the last year, I have followed the evolution of this pithy handbook and Jim’s enthusiastic work as a long-time math teacher in several area schools. His experience spans parts of six decades. Jim’s passion for his work, his students, and his approach to raising the bar for struggling students has been inspiring to me. As a career teacher and a school board chairman, I am intimately aware of the decline in math skills of middle and high school students.

What I found when I reviewed this book is that it is NOT a book about the science of teaching Pre-algebra. Don’t let Jim’s casual register, the cartoons, and side stories fool you, this is a down-to-earth, no-frills guide to the craft of teaching that can be applied by teachers willing to make changes in any upper primary, middle school, high school classroom. It addresses behavior strategies for effective classroom management, organizing instructional materials, and scheduling a week and a year of work while establishing a system of accountability for students, parents, and administrators. Threaded throughout is the emphasis on the social-emotional needs of struggling students that can be addressed by deepening expectations and giving the students the structure and support they need to believe they can master Pre-algebra.

Jim has shunned the scholarly approach. He only hints at the landmark pioneers of instructional improvement, yet their work and advice is clearly woven throughout the whole book. William Glasser would approve of the ideas for building classroom community. Every lesson resonates with Madeline Hunter’s ITIP (Instructional Theory Into Practice). His grading strategies echo Thomas Guskey. If you use Jim’s methods, you should fare well in a more modern Charlotte Danielson evaluation model.

I recommend this book to teachers newly assigned to Pre-algebra classes. I also recommend it to student teachers and to new teachers regardless of the content area. It is a resource for Title I Interventionists, and special education teachers, and an excellent book study for PLCs in middle schools, and as Jim would say, The stories are pretty good too.

Susan Watts Day, PhD

Special Education Teacher, Retired

Elementary School Counselor, Retired

Teacher Education Associate Professor, Retired

Chapter 1

What do they call it at your school? Pre-Algebra?

Yeah, I know. You didn’t want to teach this class.

Who Does? Pretty much nobody.

Most likely you’re a beginning math teacher paying your dues until you can get some real math classes. You could be from a more enlightened school where everybody takes a turn in the low-end math classes—rare, but it happens.

Or, ugh, they might be filling up your schedule because enrollment is low in your regular classes. Or, worst of all, they assigned these kids to you hoping you’d quit.

Now you have a choice. You can trudge through this class every day with one eye on the clock while you endure the soul-crushing apathy of these kids and their lousy social skills.

–OR—

You can do something meaningful and help these kids improve their math skills, their social skills, and their learning skills. At the same time, you can improve your instructional and classroom management techniques. When you get good at teaching math to kids that struggle, you might even start to like the class.

There is an upside to this assignment. They pay no attention to this class or these kids. Nobody really cares what you do with the curriculum and instruction. Keep the office phone from ringing, don’t write up too many kids, and you can pretty much do as you please. It’s not much of a kingdom, but it’s all yours and you can turn it into a reasonably pleasant experience for yourself and the kids.

I’m not a real math teacher—I was a shop teacher, an alternative school principal, and finally a math teacher working exclusively with struggling students.

I am the only teacher, that I know of, who specifically asked to teach these difficult math students. I’m good at it. I spent eleven years learning how to make these knuckleheads more successful—much more successful than they have ever been since second or third grade. I can show you how to do it too. So follow along as I explain Success Strategies for Struggling Math Students. The worst that could happen is that things won’t get any worse. Things might even get better. Let’s crack a beer (wine is okay too), and figure this out.

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I’m the old guy on the left. The other old guy is Tony, my teaching partner in Elton, who helped to develop some of the Success Strategies. Even when we’re sailing, we talk math. I wish you could join us. We would share our passion for these kids.

So why bother with this book? Why would I take a couple of years to put in the life-stealing time to write a how-to math book? I am seventy-five years old and beginning my fiftieth year of teaching. I don’t have a lot of time left, and somebody needs to document how things could be better for these kids and teachers in these low-level classes. Struggling students, and even capable students, can enjoy much better outcomes when you employ success