After years of declining test scores the Maine department of Education last month announced what it called a "Back to Basics" teaching approach in math and reading. State officials say it's a new approach aimed at getting kids invested in their own education. Brewer school department has been embracing some of these strategies for years.
"If you guys can group up in groups of three or four, you can turn your chairs around and we're going to do the Candy Crush Data Challenge," said Sean Donovan, math teacher at Brewer High School.
In Donovan's career math class, the kids are doing one of Donovan's so called "fun-tivities".... they are finding the measures of central tendency — the mean, median, and mode — of colored candies in packets of skittles.
"Does that mean I can just eat them now? Senior, Andre Lutz said.
"Yeah you can eat them once you get the data" Donovan said.
Donovan described Career Math as a tour through all of the common high school math disciplines — as they might be applied in a future job.
"We do a little bit of everything. We do a little bit of algebra, one little bit of geometry, a little bit of statistics and we kind of go through all of those basics, and I try to show the real world relevance for each of those subjects," Donovan said.
"My favorite skittle flavor is probably gotta be green. I don't know if it actually has a flavor. I just like the color," Lutz said.
Lutz said he wants to study criminal justice. And for the first project of the year was assigned to explain how math relates to that career.
"So I just did it based off of, like, the crime rates and stuff like that, for say, Illinois, right now, the crime rate is roughly 42.3 compared to say, in Maine, it's roughly 14.3}.
Donovan said he expects students to calculate their answers to problems using formulas on digital spreadsheets.
"Digital skills are very important for most careers now. So that's kind of another piece that's being folded into the class, and it can be hard. Sometimes some of the kids, as we saw, are way more adept than others," Donovan said.
Many of the practices being modeled in Donovan's classroom are in line with the state's new Back to Basics initiative, which comes in response to declining test scores since the pandemic. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Maine was 4 points below the national average in reading and math in 2024.
"I don't want to say that low test scores are the new normal, because that that feels like we're accepting something that I don't think we are," said Beth Lambert, Chief Teaching and Learning Officer at the Maine Department of Education. "But I do think there's a new normal in education. There's a new expectation."
That new expectation, she said, is to make math matter to kids by connecting it to their daily lives.
"That's what you're going to see change is you're going to see that shift in our classrooms where students are saying, Teach me this. I want to know, give me these skills," said Lambert.
And one of the most important skills...is solving problems without just "googling" the answer.
"Quite frankly, AI is going to take over a lot of that too similarly to like the calculator did, right? But you know, we still need to have those critical thinking skills," said Renita Ward-Downer who oversees curriculum and professional development for the Brewer school department and helped craft the state's math plan for the Back to Basics initiative.
"Keep doing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity, that is, you know, classic education here, and, you know, and I think our students have changed too, and so we've got to think about how we can meet their needs and and think about how we we can build that. Math is important. Math is relevant," Ward-Downer said.
Another piece to the initiative is a more concerted effort to involve parents in their children's education — well before high school. Julie Vinson, who coaches elementary age kids struggling in math, said parents can have a major influence.
"The parents know their child best. They can offer experiences that that we can't offer, you know, like cooking together, counting the chocolate chips into the cookie batter, all, whatever it is, you know, we've got to provide some real life application," Vinson said.
State officials say it will take some time to introduce these strategies to schools and train teachers. And the proposed changes are not mandatory, it's up to the districts to decide if and when they want to incorporate them.
