Ohio Journal of School Mathematics | Issue: Issue: 1(82) Summer 2019 (2019)

Volume 82 • 2019 • Summer 2019

A few of these articles share a quiet preoccupation: a rule can look obvious while the idea beneath it stays slippery. Sister Cecilia Anne Wanner watches preservice teachers assume area and perimeter move together, then hands them pentominoes until the assumption falls apart. Debra Johanning takes fraction multiplication, where the steps feel routine but the meaning is not, and lays out a set of questions for the four places students tend to get stuck. Julie Nurnberger-Haag and Jamie L. Wernet build a card game, Go-High/Go-Low, around a single surprise: with negative numbers, subtracting can leave you with more than you started with.

The rest of the issue widens the lens. Brooke Norval opens a three-part series on rewriting test items so English language learners are read on their mathematics and not their English, starting with the evidence that the wording itself costs them points. Ann Wheeler, Joe Champion, and Holly Dybvig pair children’s books with the Pythagorean theorem and with area, using stories to pull preservice teachers back into the mathematics. Different grade bands, different tools, but a common instinct that the work lives in what students notice, not in the steps they can already recite.