NAPAVINE – The first thing high school teacher Kim Conner has to do each year is work with her students on their math attitude.

In case you haven’t heard: “A lot of kids come into high school hating math,” says the Napavine High School teacher, who blames their parents who also hate math, and their previous teachers who either didn’t know how to make math fun or didn’t take the time to do so.

One of Conner’s math classes is so much fun, there’s a waiting list to get in. And more important than learning to love math, her students are learning to do math.

When they take the math section of the Washington Assessment of Student Learning in April, her students will have a chance to show how much they’ve learned.

As students around the state take and prepare for the test, Conner and the other educators interviewed say the debate over the WASL seems to have lost touch with the real goal: teaching Washington students to read, write and do math.

Delay for deadline?

Both houses of the state Legislature this month passed bills that would delay requirements that high school students pass the math WASL in order to graduate. Until such a bill is signed by the governor, students in the class of 2008 would be the first group required to pass the math, writing and reading sections of the student achievement test.

Only 58 percent of this year’s junior class have passed all three sections of the 10th grade WASL, with most failures coming in the math section.

Students in Conner’s “math lab” on Thursday said a change in state policy concerning the WASL wouldn’t affect their determination to learn how to do higher level math.

“I still think you should try as hard as you can,” said Chantelle Focht, a 15-year-old freshman who aspires to be a doctor. “You can use it in the real world.”

Halie Dugo, a 15-year-old freshman who hopes to work with horses, seemed a little disappointed in the Legislature’s plans for putting off the math WASL as a graduation requirement.

“That was the benefit of the WASL. It kind of made you push to do math,” said Dugo, who added that her mom disagrees and is happy about the delay. She said Conner’s class has given her confidence in a subject she used to dislike.

Secrets of math success

Conner, who is in her fifth year at Napavine, said one of her secret weapons for math success is group work. She divides her students into groups of three or four and they share their ideas and work out half a dozen challenging math problems together.

Of course, the process is more complicated than just pushing some desks together and writing some problems on the board at the school, which is just about halfway between Seattle and Portland.

“It’s a lot of work from a teacher standpoint,” she said. “You are more of a guide. You have to have it very structured, and the groups have to be focused. My classroom is noisy, but the kids are on task.”

About a month ago, a group of previously struggling math students took a look at the national debt, doing research, making graphs, writing essays and then sharing what they learned with their math-challenged parents.

Another day, they used math to figure out how much material they would need to sew a tent. The problem required elements of algebra, geometry and calculus to solve.

“They’re doing this higher level math, and it makes complete sense to them,” Conner said.

That makes sense to Coretta Hoffman, the secondary mathematics coach for the Moses Lake School District. Previously a middle school math teacher for 11 years, Hoffman says cooperative learning and creativity are two of her favorite math success tools.

The school district of 7,200 students has unimpressive math WASL scores – with only 44 percent of the class of 2008 passing the test on their first try – but Hoffman said school officials are not giving up, despite the fact that some of their Eastern Washington students are children of migrant workers who travel to another school district each winter.

Visualizing math

Many kids who struggle in math are the more mechanically inclined, so hands-on work is essential, Hoffman said. The modern math equivalent of games and puzzles and building blocks – teachers call them manipulatives – can make a big difference, because they help students visualize the problem, Hoffman said.

School districts that find the time and money to teach teachers to think outside the textbook have the most success at improving math achievement, Hoffman said.

“It doesn’t matter what book you have, it’s how you approach things,” she said.

Math teachers, who are usually more analytical than creative, need to remember that their students who need extra help are just the opposite: They need models, puzzles and concrete explanations.

Jessica Steinle, a math teacher at Islander Middle School in the Seattle suburb of Mercer Island, said she and her students love math games so much that in one of her classes they do nothing but play. Their favorite game is “hula hoop math.” The first team to solve a problem and race to the hoop wins.

Steinle said her students have math twice a day, which allows her to teach concepts in the first class and play games in the second. She also has game tests.

Her favorite is the “spinner test,” in which each student makes a spinner with 16 problems on the front and answers on the back. After she checks their work, the class sits in a circle and takes turns spinning other students’ games for their test questions.

“It is so much fun, they forget they are taking a test,” she said.

Serious games also capture the attention of Heather Burglund’s students at Everett High School. She said the Everett district has the advantage of being large and well supported enough to afford one of her most successful tools: a computer-based math tutoring program that enables students to move at their own pace.

Right now, Everett offers the computer and traditional math classes based on Carnegie Learning’s Cognitive Tutor as separate courses. Students who are struggling the most take two math classes a day. Others make a choice based on their learning styles and teacher recommendations.

When she put together a spreadsheet comparing seventh- and 10th-grade WASL math scores between traditional and computer-based students, she saw a 35-point jump for kids in traditional classes, a 48-point jump for those in the computer classes, and a 75-point increase for those taking both.

“Yes, we’re taking kids out of electives,” Burglund said. “But if that’s what it’s going to take for kids to graduate, that’s what I guess we’re going to have to do.”