Students go off on tangent -- and love it

Clearwater Central Catholic's annual Math Day shows fourth-graders the value of problem solving and numbers crunching.

By LORRI HELFAND, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 9, 2002

CLEARWATER -- Ten-year-old Stephen Loscalzo knows he's good at math.

"But I don't like it," he said. "It's just not fun."

To show kids like Stephen that math can be fun, the Math Honor Society at Clearwater Central Catholic High School has a game plan. Each spring, it invites Pinellas and Pasco fourth-graders to the school for math activities. With a bit of tweaking, the teens turn puzzles and games into educational opportunities.

The children and teens alike benefit from Math Day, said Gabrielle Noyes, math teacher and honor society adviser.

The fourth-graders "are at the brink of whether they like math or don't like math," she said. "My guys get an appreciation for how the kids learn, an opportunity to teach and an opportunity to be the leaders that they are."

Math Day -- actually two days, Monday and Friday -- served 350 students from nine Catholic schools. Each is a "feeder school," which means it has students that may end up at Clearwater Central Catholic some day.

For the event, the honor society set up several indoor stations and divided the kids into small groups. Each event was scored, but everyone got points just for trying.

At the graphing station, Stephen, a student at Guardian Angels Catholic School in Clearwater, connected dots on a gridded sheet of paper.

"Nice job. What do you think that's going to be?" asked senior Laura Falla, 18.

His graph looked like a house with half a roof.

Stephen referred to a list of coordinates and drew a couple of lines to complete a small square inside the figure.

"There. That's a window," Stephen boasted to Falla.

Graphing "is sort of fun," he said.

Falla said it's rewarding when math clicks for the kids.

"You can see the smile on their face when they know what they're doing," she said.

Sophomore Lindsey Grover, 16, operated the pattern station. For each exercise, she laid several cards on the table that had numbers or shapes drawn on them.

Each youth had to find a pattern and decide what number or figure came next. Her group was on the ball. The first few patterns took them a matter of seconds to figure out.

"I had a hard time with this one," Grover said as she placed seven cards on the table.

The first card's design looked like an M, the second looked like a heart with a line under it and the third looked like one circle resting on another. The kids just stared at the shapes.

Noyes made her rounds by the table and saw the perplexed faces. "What if I did this?" she asked as she covered half of each card.

Each figure reflected a mirror image of a number.

"I got it. Cool," said Alex Short, 10, of Holy Family Catholic School in St. Petersburg.

One by one the entire group figured it out.

"Good job guys," Grover told them.

The campus wrestling room became a mini bingo hall. For team competitions, several groups huddled in clusters on the floor. Instead of calling out number and letter combinations, the teen leaders read word problems. And for each answer, the kids filled a space on giant red and gold bingo cards.

"It's almost as if they don't realize they're learning because they're having so much fun," said the bingo leader, senior Elice Giorgione, 17.

But it also can be intimidating for youngsters to work with high school kids, said Giorgione's partner, sophomore Megan Fresia, 15. She was a fourth-grader the first year Clearwater Central Catholic held the event.

"It was kind of nerve-racking," she said remembering her Math Day experience. "I know what they're going through."

After indoor competitions, the kids hit the field for outdoor games. Monday's group braved the elements on an oddly bitter March day, but Friday's group was greeted by mild weather. For an hour, they raced in word problem relays and broke into large groups to create numbers with their bodies.

All in all, the games teach the kids how to go through the problem-solving process rather than choose obvious answers, said sophomore Roy Raven, 16, who worked a station that featured trick questions and optical illusions.

Juliet DiIenno, 10, of St. Patrick's Catholic School in Largo, shared a math truism about the competition that was echoed by several of her peers.

"It was hard, but once I got it, it was easy," she said.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright