EDMONDS – Darrol Haug doesn’t weigh in on the debate about education reform and the high-stakes Washington Assessment of Student Learning.
He’ll leave that to education experts and politicians.
“While the elephants are talking about it, the little mice at the bottom can get something done,” said Haug, a retired Edmonds resident who graduated from Everett High School 46 years ago.
For Haug, getting something done has meant volunteering to help seventh-grade students over the past seven years with mathematics at Maplewood Co-op School, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade campus in Edmonds.
And it has meant setting aside how he learned math to learn how a new generation learns math, a process that took him 40 hours before he began tutoring his first student.
What he has learned since then is students are learning to use concepts much earlier than he did, but some have not mastered basic “math facts,” such as multiplication and division.
They need those “embedded tools” taught in third and fourth grade to succeed, he said.
“They were doing things you and I couldn’t do in the seventh grade,” he said. “They were doing things I couldn’t remember doing at Everett High School in the ninth grade.”
Haug devotes a few minutes each time he meets new students to casually assess their multiplication and division skills with a couple of verbal questions.
He then pinpoints what number combinations his students don’t have down pat.
And in very quick sessions, using sheets of equations and shaded areas of multiplication tables, he’ll have students practice with him and at home.
He put together a packet titled “Easy Steps for Tutoring Multiplication and Division,” which is now available under the volunteer opportunities link of the Edmonds School District Web site at edmonds.wednet.edu.
In January, the district asked him to share his strategies in a seminar with teaching assistants from many of its schools
Being invited to share his techniques is quite a feat for someone who describes himself as “an old guy who pays taxes who is just asking, ‘How can I help?’”
His approach was helpful in its simplicity and ease of use, said Roberta Swierkowski, an educational assistant at Beverly Elementary School in Lynnwood.
“It was something I needed,” she said. “I needed to know how to hone in on where the children needed the focus.”
Maplewood Principal Michelle Mathis praises Haug’s ability to work with individual students at their own level and his ability to teach skills consistent with how they’re taught in the classroom.
“What I appreciate is the fresh approach he brings to each encounter,” she said.
Haug had some inspiration along the way. As a child, he remembers sitting in the back of a 1954 Chevy Bel Air with childhood friends from Everett.
The boys’ mother behind the steering wheel would say, “Haugsee, what’s six times eight?” and quiz him constantly.
The woman grilling him on his math facts was Mary Gregoire, a schoolteacher at the time who is now the mother-in-law of Gov. Chris Gregoire.
In recent years, Haug has been quizzing his grandchildren and members of their soccer and basketball teams with some of the very same questions.
“All of us adults have something to give and if we do it right we can give,” he said.
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