In accordance with several other California school districts, East Side Union School District will be updating their math curriculum. Beginning in 2010, California began to roll out Common Core State Standards for both English and Math courses in schools across the state. And so, since then California schools taught classes that merged several aspects of different math classes and taught it all together, rather than have them taught individually. Before the integrated style was used, students would learn Algebra 1 in their freshman year, Geometry in their second, Algebra 2 in their third and from there they could take a Trigonometry class.

The new curriculum while still being common core will no longer have the lessons be blended together. It is not a full return to the old style though as geometry will be taught in freshman year rather than sophomore year and then Algebra 1 and 2 will be taught in the following years. With this new program, they will also be doing away with math analysis as a class. 

Common Core had the initiative to create a set benchmark or a standard of what students in each grade level should be capable of doing in both subjects and ideally would be reached by all students. The initiative, while intended to better prepare students, doesn’t seem to be working out the way it was envisioned. 

 Marisa Hanson, who has been teaching math for 31 years, believes that the integrated approach has not been for the best either. 

“I did not want to go to the direction of integrated to begin with, but the state of California was pushing for it,” Hanson said. 

It was around the time of the change that almost half of students were failing algebra one and it’s for that reason that Hanson thinks the district was willing to accept the change. However, despite this change, Hanson says “that it hasn’t gotten better.”

The decision to revert to this traditional way has been going on for the last three years. Hanson shares that with the help of Lawrence Yee, the Subject Area Coordinator of math for the East Side Union, they were able to make the change.

The change to the new system will not be seamless and will take a bit of time to be felt throughout all grade levels as they are phased out over the next 2 years. “Next year there will be no math one, And so I’ll do math two next year and then the following year, we’ll only have math three,” Hanson says about the process. 

The change will not be completely easy for the teachers either as “anytime you change a textbook as a teacher, you have to go back and learn everything that the textbook teaches for that section, so it’s a lot of work,” according to Hanson. She also affirms that for the most part she will abandon her current lesson plans and have to create new ones in order to accommodate the new textbooks.

Even with these challenges, Hanson has hope that the changes will be worth it and will see a positive change come as a result but also states that “we never really know until we actually try it, right?”  Hanson, while not fully convinced by some of the changes made, says, “A lot of districts have done it  and they have been having success, so we’re just gonna try to do it and see what happens.”