MATHia is an online program designed by Carnegie Learning that students at Malden High School are assigned for homework and general math understanding skills. Most teachers have a MATHia checklist to keep track of what workspaces are due on a certain day.
"I'd say, it's some type of homework, I guess, but overall it's all right. I don't really have [many] complaints about it other than there's times where it just piles up,” said freshman Yunus Yousfi.
There is also a textbook portion of Carnegie Learning which students have mixed opinions on. “I like the textbooks, we haven’t done it in a while and I think they actually help with all the problems in it; the textbooks are pretty much the curriculum so I think they do help,” said freshman Johnny Mei.
In the past years the freshman math curriculum has changed quite a bit, Malden High School has never had to use any math resources like MATHia or the Carnegie Learning Textbook. MATHia is a resource that has been introduced to students just this year. As this resource is so new it is important to get the perspective of students.
“I get [assignments] done by the end of the quarter, but it definitely impacts my other grades because … I don't have time for a lot of other classes,” Omar Chouiki stated.
MATHia is meant to assist students and educate them in key areas where they don’t feel confident, but instead, some feel as if it is a non-effective, time-consuming factor in their learning. On the other hand, “It will help you study for tests since the stuff on MATHia is on the curriculum. It eventually comes up,” said Mei.
The math department started using this new Carnegie Learning program this year, and it has been a new experience for everybody.
“We use MATHia because it's a software that came with the textbooks that we ordered that we decided to go with. So it's one of those hand-in-hand things where we do sometimes supplement here and there,” voiced math teacher Evan Mauser. And, if students “need a little bit more of something, IXL is still out there, or Delta Math is still out there."
Kayla Scheitlin, the teacher leader of the math department, explained that the “first thing was that we knew that we wanted to adopt a curriculum to help really raise the level of mathematics that we were teaching in classes and make it more equitable for all students.”
Malden High School wanted to try something new this year instead of other programs like IXL or Khan Academy. When introduced to MATHia, they all agreed that it would be beneficial to students and their general educational understanding of the math subject.
"We knew that we wanted to adopt a curriculum to help really raise the level of mathematics that we were teaching in classes and make it more equitable for all students."
- Kayla SchEItlin
“There's a lot of good material in this; there's a lot of good questions, a lot of hard problems for kids to work on in this book that I probably wouldn't think of myself. But then I have to think of, 'how do I tailor this to my students?' So that's been another big thing this year,” stated Joshua Sellers, a Math 2 teacher at Malden High School.
“So, the purpose of MATHia is to give students a self-paced, independent learning platform, where they can have a chance to hopefully preview the material before we see it in class or otherwise practice the material that we did in class on their own at home or in school and be able to work at their own pace. So, I know for students that are more advanced, they like being able to work ahead of the class a little bit, and for students that are not as advanced, they like being able to work at their own pace too,” stated Susannah Miller, a math teacher at Malden High School.
Overall, the Carnegie Learning program is a mixture of two sections, the MATHia online work program itself and the textbook correlated to it. Students and teachers both have mixed perspectives on it and they work in the future to make it a better experience for students.
