Math Teacher’s Instruction Adds Up

In Cindi Hausheer’s classroom, math creeps up in the most unexpected places--even the daily attendance.

After a quick roll call Monday morning, Hausheer turned to her fourth-grade students and sprang an impromptu lesson on them.

“What percent of the class is here today?’ she asked.

Without pause, the children belted out the answer: “96%!”

For these students at Montevideo Elementary in Mission Viejo, math crops up in every class activity, seeping into their brains so unconsciously that they rarely even know they’re using complex principles, Hausheer said.

“I promote the idea that math is all around us,” said Hausheer, a 25-year educator who has spent most of those years at Montevideo. “I believe that math is just common sense learned through patterning.”

This common-sense approach to teaching math has earned Hausheer a place among the nation’s top educators with the Presidential Award of Excellence for Math Teaching, a White House honor handed every year to one elementary and one secondary teacher from each state.

Hausheer will accept the award in June in Washington.

“She’s just a master teacher,” said Jim Lee, Montevideo principal. “She has a way of teaching the most difficult concepts in a very simplistic way, so that every child has a very good chance of learning.”

With so many students paralyzed by “mathphobia,” teaching algebra and geometry to young children can be a challenge, Hausheer admits.

But the trick, she said, is to start early and make math an inescapable part of children’s daily lives. “You have to start with a simple idea and then constantly integrate.”

In her class, even the smallest activity--like folding a piece of paper--becomes a math lesson. In that simple act, children can see intersecting lines, right angles and lines of symmetry, all cornerstones of geometry.

For these children, words like “vertex” and “congruent” come easily. Percentages pose no problem, and fractions are a breeze.

“She keeps every day involving them in mathematic principles so it’s fun,” Lee said.

Hausheer’s teaching philosophy has attracted attention from the Orange County Department of Education, which has used her in the past as a consultant for math education.

She often speaks at conferences and teaches courses at such local universities as Cal State Fullerton, where she shares her innovative ways of teaching. In the “fraction game,” for example, students compete to reduce and enlarge fractions in the quickest time.

This game often replaces the generic textbook lessons and gives math a life beyond homework problems and chapter tests.

“It’s pretty fun,” said Jeff Duchateau, 10, rattling off fractions in a race to beat his opponent during the fraction game Monday. “Especially with a good math teacher.”