Hello Routty Math Teacher Community,

Welcome to my new blog series– Confessions of a Middle Grades Math Student!

While we all look forward to summer as a time for some much needed rest and relaxation, we also spend considerable time preparing for the new school year. With that in mind, I will be providing purposeful professional development to support your summer learning as we prepare for the new school year. 

Over the course of the summer, I will be providing insight into the rules, tips, and strategies that students bring into the middle grades mathematics classroom from earlier grades that do not support the development of more advanced skills. 

I will introduce a new topic each week, drawing the majority of the topics from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) article titled, “13 Rules that Expire” by Karen S. Karp, Sarah B. Bush, and Barbara J. Dougherty (2014). You can download a copy of the article here. In this article, the authors describe rules that “expire” and are no longer valid at a certain point in a student’s mathematics career.

Through this blog series, I will explore these rules and offer suggestions on ways to better support our students’ growth and understanding of the mathematical content and skills underlying them. The information will be presented from the student’s perspective so that we might gain some insight on how our students internalize what we say. 

It is my hope to generate some discussion and get feedback on these ideas. Please feel free to comment on my blog The Routty Math Teacher Blog or on The Routty Math Teacher Facebook Page.

Happy Reading!