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Ken Keech found his students more engaged in their algebra lessons this past school year. While the math concepts and degree of difficulty stayed the same, Keech said adding the students’ own community to their work made all the difference.

“You can teach students how to find regression equations with any data,” Keech said. “They can collect data for something like height versus arm length, run a regression and that’s a bravo lesson, but it won’t mean anything. We wanted to do something that would make an impact.”

Keech, along with fellow Nottingham High School teacher Betty Routhouska and Syracuse University Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Education Nicole Fonger, worked to integrate the history of Syracuse into their classwork. This February, Keech and Routhouska’s ninth and tenth-graders ran regression equations, which are used to find a relationship in a dataset, on the shift of the city’s Black population before and after the creation of Interstate 81.

The three published their research, “People, Place, and Population Predictions,” through the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in August. On Oct. 12, the Syracuse City School District recognized the two teachers for the success of their curriculum and for sharing their work for other teachers to apply in schools around the world.

“We appreciate teachers like Mr. Keech and Mrs. Routhouska for their innovation and leadership,” said Anthony Davis, SCSD’s interim superintendent, at the district’s school board meeting. “With them in our district, we know that our students aren’t just learning information — they’re knowing how to use it.”

At the end of their instruction, Keech, Routhouska and Fonger all said that the students were noticeably more engaged with the lessons and their subject matter. Routhouska also found that her pupils were not just absorbing the material but wanted to use what they learned to take action.

“I had kids ask what they can do to help this situation in their community,” Routhouska said. “They wanted to help with the breathing problems, help correct what I-81 has done in the past and help with what’s going to be done when it’s torn down. You don’t just have kids learning the math — you have them wanting to make a difference.”

Getting high school students engaged with math early on is incredibly important in New York State, Keech said. In the state, students must pass the Regents Examination in Algebra I in ninth grade and in Algebra II in tenth grade to graduate high school. Many of those who don’t pass the exams by the end of tenth grade drop out of high school, Keech said.

“The ninth and tenth-graders are the ones that we really have to focus on,” Keech said. “If we don’t make them understand that math is an empowering thing and not just a bunch of confusing worksheets, then we are going to lose them.”

The dropout rate in the state disproportionately affects Black students, Keech said. New York State ranked 42nd in high school graduation rate of Black students in 2022 while having the 12th-most Black residents. Keech said that Nottingham, which has a predominantly Black student body, has a dropout rate of over 30%.

Keech had previously run similar lessons in cities with similar segregational highway constructions, coming up with the idea when working in Philadelphia. From there, Routhouska joined on to teach the lessons, and Keech enlisted the help of Fonger, with whom he had previously developed teaching practices, to bring in ideas based on her research on student learning.

The Nottingham teachers met with Fonger weekly before they began teaching the lessons, ensuring that they would bring a “culturally and historically responsive literacy framework” to life, Fonger said.

“I believe it’s essential for high school algebra students to see how algebra can be applied in their everyday lives,” she said. “Learning the tools of algebra is not only an abstract skill or concept—it’s directly applicable to making sense of our histories, our current times, and for designing our futures.”

After weeks of meetings, Keech and Routhouska decided on a curriculum centered around the thriving Black community of Syracuse’s 15th Ward in the 1940s and 1950s. The budding 15th Ward was weeded out with the establishment of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956, which led to the construction of I-81. The highway demolished Black-owned businesses and homes in the area, segregating the city and creating health risks for those living near the highway.

To combine this history with algebra topics, Keech and Routhouska had their students run regression equations of the population of the 15th Ward before and after the construction of I-81 and make predictions on how the project would have an effect. To effectively drive home their example, Keech and Routhouska showed their students photos of thriving Black couples and read interviews of people who lived in the 15th Ward.

“I thought that part was what really brought them in,” Routhouska said. “They saw people who had lived there a long time and recognized how happy they were and how welcome they felt. Then later, they saw how that all changed.”

Students also engaged with virtual reality simulations showing the past and current day 15th Ward, looked at maps of Syracuse diagramming the area and watched videos describing the prevalence of asthma in the area.

“They would look at the maps and realize they knew where those places were,” Routhouska said. “Some said that their grandparents lived near I-81 and have asthma. Things like that continued to bring up new connections for the kids and helped them get involved in the lesson.”

With the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’s publication of their work, Keech, Routhouska and Fonger hope that more math teachers take the time to develop historically applied lessons. While an algebra question requires many different steps to solve, Keech said that unless students embrace the reasons for those steps, they won’t fully understand the concept.

“When I took woodshop in high school, we never had a hammer or a saw exam,” Keech said. “We were just told to make a box, and tools like a hammer or saw let us do that. Essentially, that’s what we did with these lessons. We told our kids to make a box.”

Published on October 24, 2022 at 1:53 am

Contact Sam: swarre03@syr.edu