Sally Rihn Makes Math Fun for Medina Valley 3rd Graders

Walk into Sally Rihn's classroom at Castroville Elementary and you'll find smiling faces and excited students working on math problems. In this classroom, the students learn multiplication by understanding the relationship between addition and subtraction.

Gone is rote memorization. She stands groups of students up and they count "groups" and "members." They see the numbers in concrete terms, then they learn to express the numbers in pictures, and finally in equations.

When asked why she stands students up to do these exercises, she says, "It gets them engaged. They pay attention. They never know what I'm going to ask them to do, so they listen," she laughs. Her techniques are working. She has students with 100% mastery and apparently 100% enthusiasm for her subject matter.

Her goal for every student is that he or she has fun with math and learns to feel good about him- or herself. She believes this will help her students avoid "math anxiety" that plagues so many people in our society today. She says knows they are learning, but she also learns from them every day. That's what makes teaching exciting - there's something new and different all the time!