In Teaching Math as a Language, author Rodney Weems explains how training students to use a simple, triangular map with eleven elements gives them the confidence and ability to solve ninety-five percent of all problems encountered in middle and high school. The map functions as a mathematical mnemonic that lowest-quartile students, in particular, gravitate towards with striking success. This practical, integrated approach to effective math instruction is aimed at new and mid-career teachers, including homeschool parents. Here are a few quotes from Teaching Math as a Language: "It is remarkable that in most American secondary schools no consistent style of problem solving runs uniformly across the grades. The resulting inefficiencies are shameful, the myriad and often contradictory methods that students must struggle with frightening." "The less adept the students, the higher the likelihood they will cling to the first procedures they are taught as the only procedures they comprehend and feel comfortable using. It becomes all the more imperative, then, that the first procedures they are taught carry a mirror of larger problems to come." "[Emotional safety] is arguably the most difficult element to provide in many learning environments because providing it requires a well-developed sense of balance. It requires creating a space where humor makes the environment fun, but where laughing at others' failures is never an option; a place where perfection is the goal, but simultaneously a place where mistakes are lauded as the stepping stones to success rather than loathed as indicators of failure; a place where external discipline systems form guide rails along established learning paths, but also a place that seeks to fan the flames of curiosity and self-directed exploration." Participants in the workshops that encouraged this book have written: "So many practical ideas reduced to a few categories." "It was empowering to be with an educator that has developed techniques based on reflections on direct student learning experiences." "Great, can't wait to use this every day." Rodney is the recipient of a B.S. in physics from the United States Naval Academy, a Dodge Foundation Alternate-Route Teaching Scholarship winner and a former National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Participant. Eighty-nine percent of his lowest-quartile students have passed the New Jersey state High School Proficiency Assessment in recent years, at-risk students performing twenty-five percent above his school's average. Visit us at www.trilastic.com