Math

Constance M. Pierce, 65, a math teacher and tutor remembered for the patient guidance she gave her students and the warm company she brought her friends, died Wednesday at her Wynnewood home of 14 years after a long fight against cancer. Reserved but empathetic, with lively brown eyes that expressed what her refined manner did not, Mrs. Pierce taught math classes in the Philadelphia system for 12 years, first at Vaux Junior High School and later at Shoemaker. After taking time off to tend to a health problem and raise a son and daughter, Mrs. Pierce turned her vigorous interest back to students, working for 10 years, until 1984, as a high school math specialist for the Delaware County Intermediate Unit.

In a taped interview to run tomorrow night on C-SPAN, a gravelly voice President Clinton confesses that he's a bit sleepy because he was up the night before helping Chelsea with her math homework. " . . . When you have a teenage child, it's a daily struggle to avoid becoming completely irrelevent to them," Clinton says. "So, when my daughter asks me to help her with math, I always try to do it. " In the gabber, taped Sept. 29, he added: "I do need more sleep than I used to - and last night I didn't get it. I try to get at least six hours and I want to get seven.

The Cherry Hill School District has received two grants, one for the construction of a playground at the Barclay Early Childhood Center and the other to support an algebra program at Cherry Hill High School East. The CNA Insurance Foundation will fund the $40,000 playground, which is scheduled to be built by foundation employees and Cherry Hill residents on June 8. The math department at Cherry Hill East has received a $10,000 grant from the Toyota Time Foundation, to be used for the purchase of graphing calculators and motion detectors.

Users of Let's Read Math, a program created by a Lower Makefield educator, are growing exponentially. Since its launch in October 2004 at a local library, the program - linking literacy and numbers - has been used by parents, children and teachers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia. This month, developer Claire Passantino, 60, will begin work with the College of New Jersey to introduce Let's Read Math to elementary school teachers throughout that state. "I don't know where it's going, but it's a great ride," she said.

A test of reading skills among inmates in Philadelphia's prison system yielded some worse news than expected: About 25 percent to 30 percent of prisoners read at a second- or third-grade level. The average reading level was at a fourth-grade mark, but city Prisons Commissioner Louis Giorla said he had previously assumed that the average was between a sixth- and eighth-grade level. "That was surprising," Giorla said of the results, which he shared Tuesday with members of the Criminal Justice Advisory Board.

WASHINGTON - Some progress. Still needs improvement. The nation's report card on math and reading shows fourth and eighth graders scoring their best ever in math, and eighth graders making some progress in reading. But the results released Tuesday show how far the nation's schoolchildren are from achieving the No Child Left Behind law's goal that every child in America be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Just more than one-third of the students were proficient or higher in reading.

Beaver College in Glenside has been awarded a total of $223,500 in federal grants to retrain high school teachers in math and science to help solve critical local shortages in those fields. The grants represent about one-fifth of the funds awarded statewide to 27 colleges, state Department of Education officials said. Beaver will offer new non-tuition programs to train teachers in math, chemistry and the physical sciences. The programs are open to current math and chemistry teachers who wish to improve their skills and also to teachers in other disciplines who wish to become certified math and chemistry teachers.

The mathematics skills of American students are improving, but the national math grade still "needs improvement," the Education Department said yesterday. The study, which assessed students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades, was the first national measurement of math performance since 1992. Sixty-four percent of fourth graders have basic math skills, 62 percent of eighth graders and 69 percent of 12th graders, the study said. That is up from 59 percent of fourth graders, 58 percent of eighth graders and 64 percent of 12th graders in 1992.

Jim Heron has been teaching high school English for the last 15 years, but math has always fascinated him. Lenore Goldberg is certified to teach high school biology, but when she became a substitute teacher, she found she enjoyed math more. So, Heron and Goldberg took steps to parlay their love for numbers into new careers. They and 21 other area teachers spent half of this summer vacation back in school as part of a two-year recertification program at Beaver College in Glenside, Montgomery County.

Can mathematics be fun? For anyone who has ever sweated out a tax return or done battle with an unbalanced checkbook, the answer no doubt is a quick no. Barbara Berman would beg to differ. For math-haters, she says, the problem stems from childhood. No, Berman is not a psychologist. She is the director of Project SITE, a program that trains teachers to get children psyched about math. "If you think about little kids, they're naturally curious," Berman pointed out. "They look for patterns, they look for things repeating themselves.