Radical Equations

Bob Moses became famous as one of the chief organizers of the Freedom Summer of 1964, when hundreds of college students invaded Mississippi to fight nonviolently for civil rights. But Moses was also a math teacher, and that combination of callings helps explain what he has since become. Every Monday during the school year, Moses leaves his home in Cambridge, Mass., and fliesto Jackson, Miss., to teach algebra at all-black Lanier High School. Moses, 66,is determined to make mathematical literacy as much a battle cry as voting rights were 40 years ago. He wants to overthrow what he calls “sharecropper education” by helping all students master algebra, preferably by the eighth grade, so they are ready to take college-prep math courses in high school.

Moses drills his students with the same quiet intensity he displayed in the ’60s, when he was repeatedly beaten — and nearly killed — but never wavered from his path. He has hit upon a fresh, effective way to teach abstract math concepts. His method begins with physical experience, then moves to pictorial and finally symbolic representation. He teaches about integers by leading students on a tour of civil rights monuments. The kids then draw pictures of the journey and create number lines in which each stop represents an integer, and use them to add and subtract positive and negative numbers. “The idea is to use their real-life experience to learn abstract concepts,” says Moses.

Moses has leveraged his ideas by training other teachers to apply them. His organization, the Algebra Project, born 19 years ago, is based on ideas he developed while helping his children learn to solve math problems. Today the project, which has its headquarters in Cambridge, has trained more than 500 teachers and reaches 10,000 children in 31 school districts. His approach seems to work. At Lanier, Algebra Project students have typically scored from 12 to 15 points higher (on a scale of 100) than the school average on statewide algebra tests. “He’s getting the kids to believe they can do math,” says Lanier’s principal, Johnny Hughes. “That’s the first step in helping them to achieve.”