It wasn't anybody's birthday when fifth-grade teacher Nick Letsinger brought in pizza for his students at McIntosh Elementary School, in Rockford, Illinois. He cut one pizza into four slices and handed them out. He divided another into six slices and passed them out too. "Would you rather have a fourth or a sixth?" he asked. The students could not take a bite until they understood which slice was larger.
Each school year, students around the country fold sheets of paper into halves, fourths and eighths. They fit together different combinations of multicolored pattern blocks. Some work with plastic pizzas instead of real ones. They do all of these things with one goal: figuring out fractions.
"Fractions are important," Letsinger told TFK. "Kids need to understand how fractions, decimals and percents are all interrelated."
But some teachers worry that kids are unnecessarily stressed out by fractions. "There's so much to keep straight when it comes to fractions," says Susan Adami, a fifth-grade teacher at North Carroll Middle School, in Hampstead, Maryland. "And outside of school, we really don't use them much."
With students in Singapore, Taiwan and Japan outperforming kids in the U.S. on math achievement tests, educators are questioning the way math is taught today. A few wonder if kids should study fractions at all.
Still, Letsinger prefers to see the glass as being half that is, .50 full. "You can take any curriculum item and make it applicable and interesting," he says. "And then kids love it."