Susan Gehn

Susan Gehn, a first-grade teacher in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, tells how using story problems in her class was one instructional and curricular change that helped to spark an interest in her students and herself in mathematics. Excerpted from the video series Schools That Work: The Research Advantage, videoconference #2, Children as Problem Solvers (NCREL, 1991).

"Math used to be rather boring to teach for me, it was like, I would assign a page, we might do some problems together, but it was the algorithm type things. We really didn't do story problems, and it used to get sort of tiring, and if it was tiring for me, it certainly had to be for those poor kids, and when I started doing story problems, and the kids were getting excited, it was exciting for me and it was sort of a mutual excitement, and in fact, there are some days that, these are first graders of course and their attention span isn't quite there, but there will be days by the end of the first grade year where we will be doing math for an hour and a half, and they will be begging me for more math."