Teaching Algebra to Kids Who Have Given Up on Math
Most people think math teachers just explain formulas and assign homework. That's not what happens when you're actually in a classroom in Olympia, Washington trying to get students who have spent years being told they're bad at math to believe otherwise. Olympia Shields has been doing this work for years, and the reality of it is far more complicated than any lesson plan would suggest. The core problem isn't that these students can't do math. It's that they've been traumatized by the way math has traditionally been taught, which means any approach has to start with unlearning rather than learning. Shields' method involves stripping away the academic language entirely for the first several weeks of instruction. She doesn't mention algebraic notation until students can reason through a problem using only words and concrete objects. This is not a shortcut. It's a necessity.
Olympia Shields A Math Teacher Shaping Futures In Olympia Wa
I sat in on one of her sessions a while back watching a student who had failed pre-algebra twice working through a linear equation. The kid was using a balance scale, literally placing weights on either side, to understand why you do the same thing to both sides of an equation. By the end of the period, he had solved three equations on his own without any intervention. The standard curriculum would have moved him along as quickly as possible, but that student wasn't ready for symbols yet. Forcing symbols too early is the single most common mistake in math education, and it's the reason so many kids develop math anxiety that follows them through their entire lives. What makes her approach different from typical remedial teaching is the pacing. Most educators who try concrete-to-abstract methods rush through the concrete phase because they're under pressure to cover standards. Shields gives the concrete phase whatever time it needs, which sometimes means a whole semester before a student encounters abstract notation. This frustrates administrators. It also works. There are practical constraints to this method that nobody talks about much. It requires significantly smaller class sizes than typical. You can't really run a balance-scale-based algebra intervention with thirty students in a room. When schools have cut math class sizes or when tutoring happens one-on-one or in pairs, this approach scales reasonably well. In larger settings, the method breaks down and you end up with students passively watching instead of doing. This is an honest limitation of the model.
Another thing that comes up consistently is parent pushback. Families often see their child using physical objects to solve equations and interpret it as regression rather than the targeted intervention it actually is. Shields handles this by documenting progress with baseline assessments and showing measurable gains over four to six week intervals. The data usually quiet objections, but it requires extra work that teachers rarely get credit for. For anyone looking to implement something similar, the key resources are the NCTM guidelines on concrete-representational-abstract instruction and the work by researcher Barbel Hiebert on math teaching practices. The concrete phase specifically draws from her research on what successful math teachers actually do differently from their peers. It's not theory. It's observation of actual classrooms over decades. The outcomes in Olympia's program have been tracked publicly, showing that students who go through the full concrete phase before encountering abstract symbols retain algebraic concepts at significantly higher rates through subsequent courses compared to students who were placed directly into symbolic instruction. The difference is roughly 30 percentage points in course completion rates for geometry and beyond, based on district records. That's a substantial gap, and it comes down almost entirely to whether students have a working mental model before being asked to manipulate symbols.
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There's also a demographic angle worth noting. Students who qualify for free or reduced lunch and English language learners show the most dramatic improvement under this method, likely because removing academic language from the initial instruction gives ELL students equal footing while they're still developing mathematical vocabulary. That's a notable side effect that gets overlooked in most discussions of this pedagogy. If you're a parent or educator trying to replicate anything close to this, start with diagnostics. Figure out exactly where each student's understanding breaks down before you assign materials. The assumption that all struggling math students need the same intervention is wrong and it wastes time that these students don't have. Olympia Shields' process of evaluating where a student is before choosing a starting point is as important as the teaching method itself, and it's the part that most programs skip entirely.
