DATE: Friday, May 2, 1997                   TAG: 9705020599

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY NANCY YOUNG, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE                        LENGTH:   79 lines

REAL-LIFE EXAMPLES ADD TO THE FUN OF MATH SUBTRACTION AND ADDITION AREN'T JUST ABSTRACT CONCEPTS IN THIS TEACHER'S CLASS.

Alice Koziol's students owe her.

There's $21.39 a week for desk rental. A missing homework assignment costs $7.65. Unnecessary talking or ``blurting out'' sets them back 57 cents.

Of course, she gave them each an initial deposit of $50 and each week they receive another $25 deposit. If they play their cards right, at the end of the year, she'll owe them.

In imaginary money, at least.

By teaching students how to balance their ``checkbooks'' Koziol reinforces their addition and subtraction skills. Going to a mall and observing how many people are carrying bags compared to the total who go by is a way of teaching fractions - and people skills.

``I'm just trying to make math come alive,'' said Koziol, a fourth-grade math teacher at E.W. Chittum Elementary School who was named this year's elementary math teacher of the year by the Virginia Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

``I just want them to understand that fractions are not isolated to the classroom. . . . Everything in life is mathematically oriented.''

When Koziol says everything, she means everything. When the class starts to get a little too loud, she reminds the students to use their ``six-inch voices.''

``When you walk into that class, you just feel the magic,'' said Dan Mulligan, math supervisor for the district. ``You see a traditional class and you see her class and you think, `Wow!' ''

Walk into Koziol's classroom and you'll rarely see all the students working on the same thing at once. She breaks the class down into small groups and assigns them each an activity. Each team has a captain and someone responsible for keeping track of all the materials.

``They learn more from each other than from me,'' Koziol said.

One group was counting alphabet noodles to determine the ratio of each letter to the the total number counted. Koziol asked what they thought the denominator should be.

One student quickly answered, ``26.''

Koziol thought for a moment and said, ``Hmm. That seems logical to me, but are all the letters in this container, Hunter? You've got a job. You've got to check.''

As the students worked out their problems, Koziol walked around the room, but instead of asking for answers, she'd ask, ``What did you discover?''

Koziol said she is teaching the kind of math class she didn't have as a child, where the emphasis was more on memorization than on truly understanding math.

``I was never very good in math,'' she said.

But as she learned to teach math, she learned to love it, to have fun with it. And having fun with it is the key to understanding it, she said.

Parents can, and should, be a part of the fun, Koziol said.

``They (parents) want to be involved; they just don't know what to do,'' she said.

Help from parents can be as simple as sending in materials for math activities. The most important thing is for parents to know what's going on in the classroom, to feel a part of things, she said.

One way she does that is by sending home a ``tool box'' that includes samples of all the materials she uses in the classroom and the types of problems she asks the kids to solve. Children can keep the tool box for a week; parents are asked to sit down with them and go through the problems.

``It's just another way to build that home-school relationship,'' said Koziol. ``It shows mom and dad what we're actually talking about, what's going on in the classroom.''

But perhaps the greatest measure of Koziol's success is the statement of one of her students.

``I like fractions,'' said Stephen Ferguson, as though it would be hard to understand why everybody doesn't. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by MORT FRYMAN/The Virginian-Pilot

Alice Koziol, Virginia's elementary math teacher of the year, works

with fourth-grader Kate Yuen at E.W. Chittum Elementary School in

Chesapeake. ``I'm just trying to make math come alive,'' Koziol

says. KEYWORDS: MATH TEACHER OF THE YEAR

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