Cigar Box Guitar? To teach math? Really? Absolutely.

G-Funk carries his ukulele with him everywhere. As I walk up the hall to his 7th grade Career and Technical Education (CTE) classroom, I hear him playing. I hear him again as he leaves the school after the carpentry club ends. G-Funk (“Grant” to his teachers) and 200 of his middle school classmates built cigar box guitars over the past two years, during and after school. Grant’s guitar ranks among the best built and best sounding.

Using Building To Teach materials and methods, the Cigar Box Guitar Project started in one school as a way to teach 20 students “hands-on math.” It has ended up serving over 200 students from all the middle schools in Alexandria, Virginia. CTE teachers now coordinate with math teachers; students, teachers and parents gather for school district-wide “gut bucket” blues concerts; the students are engaged in their projects; and, they’re measurably improving their math skills.
 
Download the Building To Teach Cigar Box Guitar Math Instructor and Building Guide 

A small city inside Washington DC’s beltway, Alexandria, Virginia’s public schools have a diverse student population which brings tremendous challenges, opportunities and rewards. I’m a wooden boat builder and carpenter by trade and have become a hands-on math instructor. My own kids have led me to guitar building. (They like musical instruments better than boats...) With the on-line inspiration of Keni Lee Burgess, I’ve even started playing a little bottleneck slide. http://www.cigarboxnation.com/profile/KeniLeeBurgess

None of this work happens without good partners. Alexandria has two of the most flexible and open minded middle school CTE teachers you will ever meet in Matt Cupples and Kyle Godfrey. They’ve allowed us to come into their classrooms and work with their students. They’ve also made our work much, much better.

Curtis Blues (http://www.curtisblues.com/) is a local blues musician/ historian who’s crazier than any middle school student I’ve met. Who else could take a class of kids who have never played a lick and get them to perform a concert, on stage, in front of their peers?

Affection for cigar box guitars is not isolated to Virginia. After taking a CBG building workshop with me at a ‘Teaching with Small Boats” conference, Chris de Firmian has the kids of Ukiah, California building and playing.  He’s not alone. Google “Cigar Box Guitar” and you’ll get over a million hits. We want to continue to spread the fun. You can download the Cigar Box Guitar Math Instructor’s Guide. The related hands on math instructional materials and exercises are available through Building To Teach, also free of charge.

We get to do this work through the context of teaching math skills. Kids learn symmetry, measurement, fractions, basic geometry, even Algebra through building the guitar and laying out its fret scale. The math achievement is easily measurable; but what’s really great about this work is watching the student use what they build and change their expectations about what they can achieve.

Every Thursday afternoon G-Funk and his mates meet in Kyle Godfrey’s (CTE) classroom. They are now building electric guitars, working in hundredths of inches, learning to select the correct piece of wood for their fretboard and doing all the wiring. Best of all, I get to help.

Math Basics--Our Kids Need Them

Montgomery County, MD is a well-off DC suburb with some of the best public schools in the country. Recently, the Washington Post published articles revealing that 40%- 60% of Montgomery County students were failing the county wide tests in higher math--algebra, geometry and precalculus. And, while 62% of students may fail the geometry test, only 16% fail the class. These statistics have been public for five years and are no secret to the County School Board, educators, students and parents. (The Montgomery County PTA even published a chart showing how to fail the test and pass the class) Nor is this type of situation unique to Montgomery County. In Alexandria, VA, another well-off DC suburb, only 22% of students passed the 8th grade statewide Standards of Learning tests for math.

The problem doesn’t stop with high school. Seventy percent of Montgomery County high school students failed their math entrance exam to community college and need remediation. Northern Virginia has similar results. A national study from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University shows that 60% of students trying to enter Community Colleges fail this type of exam.

So, what’s going on here? Jerome Dancis, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, knows the answer. He says students have long needed the basics--multiplication, division, percentages, decimals, exponents and fewer calculators. If they don’t know the basics then they are in trouble.  “If (students) are not fluent in arithmetic then they are going to have trouble in Algebra I, Algebra 2 and Precalculus.”

The problem is: we’re not teaching the basics and our kids aren’t learning. The Training Within Industries program in WWII had it right. “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.” We need to truly teach the fundamentals of math. In my view, in order for this to happen, our kids need to know that math is useful. And, they need to be fluent enough in basic math to work without a calculator.

For many of these kids, the best way to learn math is through hands-on, project-based education. That’s why we developed Building to Teach, a national program that teaches teachers how to use hands-on building projects to teach math fundamentals.  I have seen hundreds of instances where kids who couldn’t grasp math in the classroom are able to learn through the building process and become excited about using math.

It’s very simple--the building process is an historic use of math; students learn the math skills if they have to use them. Historians tell us that math was developed about 2000 BC. Widespread classroom teaching of math is only about 200 years old. So, math instruction was “project- based and hands-on” for the previous 3,800 years. Math is a critical tool we all need to succeed, as well as a language we need to speak.  We forget that at our--and our kids’--peril.