A New Course this Summer

Several years ago I developed a new graduate course to help teachers and graduate students teach math to students with diverse needs. The course had four strands of diversity and focused on the math areas of numeracy and operations. The four strands of diversity were teaching math to children with special needs, with math disabilities, were in poverty, or who were English language learners. Sometime, of course, there are children who fall  into more than one of these categories. The course, GED612 has become very popular and is now taught by a wonderful teacher, soon to be Principal, Wendy Cobb who is one of only a few people who have extensive experience and qualifications in both math education and special education.

Last summer it was decided that the Math for ELLs  part of the course would be a required part of the TESOL program offered through the Applied Linguistics Department at SMC. This was a really exciting development for me because this is my primary area of research. Although several TESOL students took the one-credit part of the course it was too difficult to separate one credit from the 3-credit course and so this summer I will be teaching GED611, a one-credit course designed specifically for students in the TESOL program. This is a really exciting learning opportunity for me because I will get to work with a different population of students skilled in the wider area of teaching students who are English language learners.

The course is particularly relevant in the Burlington area of Vermont as around 45 different first languages are spoken by students in the Burlington and Winooski schools. Isn't that remarkable?

Here are a few thoughts about leap day.