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Math Out Loud

Students sing, chant, and rhyme their way to math literacy with Wendy Miller’s catchy mnemonics

By Karen B. Manahan

"I've always studied and been fascinated by languages," says Wendy Miller (R.G.V. '95), creator of Standout Math, an interactive math curriculum. After teaching high school ESL during her corps years in the Rio Grande Valley, Miller moved to Japan to teach English in a small village near Osaka. "Studying in Japan, I looked at many different school models and saw no matter where you go, language is learned in the same way - listen, speak, read, write. It's the same four steps."

When she returned to the States in 1998, Miller earned a master's degree in language acquisition and headed back to the classroom. As a fifth grade math teacher in the Denver area, she began to wonder: Do the same rules of learning language apply to learning math? On a whim, she invented a series of mnemonic devices to help teach her students new vocabulary and concepts; for estimation and rounding, for example, she would say, "Five and above, give it a shove. Four and below, lay it low."

"I come from a background in music, so I would just sit around my house and come up with these songs, chants, and raps," says Miller, who started teaching them to supplement her regular instruction. "I put them on CDs, and the other teachers wanted them like crazy."

"Our test scores went through the roof," Miller says. Soon principals from other schools and even the district superintendent were visiting her class, asking how they could share her technique with other teachers. Miller, then pregnant and ordered to bed rest, decided to type up a manual. Her twins were born six months later, and so was the curriculum for Standout Math.

"In my first presentation, a large number of principals signed on, and since then it's grown exponentially," says Miller, who notes she has done no marketing for her product and relies solely on word of mouth. "It's impacted more kids than I ever dreamed of." Today three-quarters of the school districts in Colorado and 30 states use Standout Math. Colorado schools that fully implement the program have seen an average gain of 14 percentage points on their CSAP scores.

Coyote Hills Elementary School principal Jim McDevitt has trained all of his teachers in Miller's curriculum, and he invites her back each year to observe and offer feedback. "If you watch any child during testing, you will see kids putting their pencils down and mouthing the chant to remember area or perimeter or any of these different ways to remember math rules," McDevitt says. "I was telling my daughter about Standout Math, and I started singing one of the chants: 'Is he mean? No, he's just average,' and she said, 'I know that!' Even after four years she remembered it. This program sinks into the brain and stays there a long time."

Miller, who currently oversees a staff of eight, hopes to expand Standout Math. She's also developing its preschool spin-off, Munchkin Math, a series of DVDs that teach simple shapes, telling time, and counting money. The series, animated by a former Disney cartoonist and featuring Miller, has been picked up by Barnes & Noble and Target.com.

What's next? "I've written the next eight Munchkin Math scripts," says Miller, who continues to write all content for the series. "It's my favorite part of the job."