Individualized Instruction: Thoughts, Pro and Con.

THE atmosphere in today's high school classroom is not the same as it was twenty or even ten years ago. Where once each fifty-minute period was seldom inter rupted by external or internal forces, to day's teacher often finds a parade of stu dent messengers entering the classroom with "urgent" messages for other students, "important" requests of the teacher (re quiring immediate response), and "emer gency" bulletins to apprise the teacher and students alike that the previously issued bulletin about today's assembly is no longer operable and would "the teacher please read aloud the new bell schedule." Punctuate this environment with the vicissitudes of several phone calls and adult visitors ["Hi, I'm Mrs. Jones. I'm here to take Johnny home. His father -is being sent to New Jersey for a week on business and the family can't pass up this opportunity to join him and see the sights. Will you be doing anything important this week?"] and you might see why occasion ally I'm prone to state, "It's like trying to teach in an airport terminal." So much for external interruptions. Internally, the teacher faces daily mani festations of declining student morale and spotty attendance. While national com mittees, through various rcommendations, have recently challenged the validity of compulsory education, back on the front lines, for the foreseeable future, the class room teacher must face growing numbers of students who are staunchly opposed to (and perhaps oppressed by) the "Edu cational Draft." At the same time, this same teacher (mathematics teacher, in this case) is exhorted by the superin tendent to "raise those math scores" on some standardized test. What's a body to do? Innovate (to survive) ! The teacher and the classroom format must change. The new atmosphere won't allow it to be other wise; but how to change? How does one adjust to the new pressures? Undoubtedly, the pressures and the resulting changes in classroom management are not too differ ent in many school districts. Overcoming a class's inertia regarding any coordinated activity involving every one in synchronization can be difficult or even impossible with some classes that are at the lowest level in interest and achieve ment. As a result, some teachers avoid any such coordinated activity, or carry out such activities so informally that what ever response is presented by the class, it is considered acceptable, at the very least. However, the mathematics teacher's ma terial (the curriculum) is too well orga nized and too well agreed-upon for him to consider just any response on the part of the student acceptable. What the stu dent must be able to do is well defined and looked for by the teacher of the next course in the math sequence. Where other teachers might adjust to the new classroom atmosphere by greatly informalizing their approach and dropping many visible signs of structure, mathe matics teachers have been slow to follow.