Algebra Project Gives Poor Children a Sense of ‘Ownership’ Over Math : Education: Course steers them toward an ease with complex concepts. It begins with a trip--an experience that serves as a foundation for learning.

INDIANOLA, Miss. —  Some of the students, a teacher said, have never seen an elevator--theirs being a one-story world.

Some, their principal said, have never left Sunflower County, an expanse of flat farm fields interrupted only by an occasional uncut shade tree amid cotton rows or by a little whitewashed church.

So changes had to be made in a special, experience-based math curriculum developed in faraway Boston, with its mass transit and skyscrapers, before it could be tried in the Mississippi Delta.

The course, called the Algebra Project and now used in 50 schools around the nation, begins with a trip. And whether inner-city students ride a subway and catalogue the stations to work their problems--or Delta kids take a yellow school bus to landmarks here--their real destination is the same.

They’re being steered toward an ease and facility with complex math concepts, according to project developers. They’re being led through an academic “gate” that has barred many disadvantaged students from college.

“It’s more fun,” said sixth grader Howard Mitchell, whose Algebra Project classmates at Indianola Middle School worked busily on a recent morning.

His classroom would remind no one of the chalk-dust clouds and head-scratching that used to typify the study of why X plus Y equals Z.

Here, said Howard, “we work as a team.” And the four-student working groups, each with a name such as Hip-Hop Kids or Boyz in the ‘Hood, are just the beginning of what’s different, fun--and, teachers say, effective--about this approach.

First of all there’s the bus trip, the “physical experience” that serves as a foundation for learning.

On their trip, the Indianola students stopped at about a dozen locations in town: the police station, a hospital, stores that welcomed the children and factories that showed off their machinery.

“They gave the students a grand tour,” said Bobby Rushing, principal of the 625-pupil middle school where 99% are black and nearly all qualify for free or subsidized lunches.

The kids took notes along the tour: the order of the stops, distances between them and other information.

“It’s not just numbers now. It’s taken on meaning,” said Howard’s teacher, Thelma McGee.

As she spoke, she monitored the clusters of activity around her: groups completing brightly colored maps of their trip, others consulting on the symbols they’ve been asked to invent for mathematical games they derive from the maps: new forms of plus and minus, symbols for direction, for “start here,” “stop here” and so on.

Heads were together, discussion was quiet--and encouraged.

“In groups they all know they have to contribute,” said McGee. “For so long, children had an inferiority complex that the teacher would ‘call on me and I wouldn’t know the answer.’ Now, in groups, they’re not afraid.”

In another Algebra Project class, Debbie Murphy sees an additional change.

“I’m no longer the teacher in this classroom, I’m the facilitator. The children are teaching each other. And they are learning so much more from each other’s experiences than from me,” she said.

“Because a lot of kids, especially in sixth and seventh grade, don’t listen to their teacher anyway. They think, ‘Oh, she’s just this old woman up there.’ But when it’s coming from each other, they really get a lot more out of it.”

She added, “If nothing else this year, they’ve gotten a positive idea about math . . . so when they get to their higher-level math classes, they’re going to think, ‘This is fun, this isn’t hard.’ ”

That’s the point, said Bob Moses, who created the Algebra Project curriculum.

A legendary figure in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Moses developed it two decades later out of math lessons that he, as a former math teacher, was giving his own children at home to ensure they were not closed out of advanced educational options.

“A student who has calculus coming into college has sort of the complete range of the college curriculum open to him,” Moses reasoned. “But to do calculus in your senior year of high school means you have to do algebra in the eighth grade.” To do that, he learned, students must be prepared in the sixth and seventh grades.

Over time, the goal he set for his children grew to include all children. He emphasized minority students, who have been plagued by low test scores, high drop-out rates and a tendency to avoid math and science classes.

Moses referred to surveys showing that black students, such as his own children, who reached higher math classes were a rarity. “It broke down along race and class,” Moses said. “Middle-class white students were judged to be prepared.”

From the Moses children’s Cambridge, Mass., public school, the Algebra Project has spread widely. It’s now in 50 schools including Oakland; New Orleans; Louisville, Ky.; Milwaukee, and Chicago.

The Delta Algebra Project started this year in three rural school systems in Mississippi and one in Arkansas.

“He was here in the ‘60s, during the struggle. That’s why he wanted it here,” said Rushing, the Indianola principal.

Moses, originally a New Yorker, had worked in the Delta, braving threats and assaults to register voters and organize blacks.

His return to this place and to the classroom fits well with his earlier activism, said Taylor Branch, author of the civil rights history “Parting the Waters.”

“He saw the dividing line between whether you had a chance or not in Mississippi (in the ‘60s) was whether you could vote,” said the historian, who has attended some Algebra Project workshops and has been impressed with the students’ excitement.

“Now it’s whether you could pass first-year algebra. I think he still sees that sharp dividing line between whether you have a chance or not.”

Frank Davis, a math professor who is conducting a three-year evaluation of the Algebra Project under a MacArthur Foundation grant, agreed. “Bob Moses is a community organizer primarily,” he said.

So, while teaching math skills, the Algebra Project attempts to create support networks of parents, local college educators and others to back up the students and their teachers; it attempts to retrain teachers. “It really is changing schools,” said Davis, who teaches at Lesley College in Cambridge.

Moses said the curriculum is written so that no student starts at a disadvantage. Each builds on his or her own experience, using his or her own language. Thus the subway trips that kids take in Boston, the bus rides in the Delta, and the maps and reports and formulas they derive from them.

“Mathematics should get constructed by the students as much as possible based on these experiences,” he said.

Shirley Conner, who oversees the Algebra Project at a school in Hollandale, Miss., said she believes it will make students look differently at their island in an ocean of cotton fields and catfish farms.

Their bus sojourn, where kids logged the Yazoo River Bridge, the Sunflower River and other landmarks and then “mathematized” the information, had energized them.

“We have no theaters, no McDonald’s,” she said. “We don’t have a transit system, we don’t have traffic lights.”

And yet the students had had an experience many hadn’t had before, she said: a sense of “ownership” of math.

“And when they get to handle it as their property, they can learn,” she said. “The students learn to enjoy.”