Susan Gehn, a first-grade teacher at Cottage Grove Elementary School in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, talks about how the parents of her students have supported her efforts to use different methods for teaching mathematics. Excerpted from the video series Schools That Work: The Research Advantage, videoconference #2, Children as Problem Solvers (NCREL, 1991).
"All of my parents have been extremely supportive in this. Many of them are real glad to see me going away from the memorization of math facts and the drill and computation because I think they are reflecting back to their own schooling and math wasn't so positive with some of those parents, and so they are seeing their children right now able to enjoy math, feeling confident with math and they see the children solving problems, because parents have reported to me that when their child will come home, they will talk about a problem they have solved in the classroom that day or that they are always posing problems for their parents, and I think the parents are really fascinated by that."