atlanticville Jan. 20 thru Jan. 26 1994
He adds it up on TV
City teacher brings math to the masses
By Daniel Mintz Long Branch -- English was never a problem. Social studies seemed a simple matter of remembering names, dates and places. Science was a bit tougher, but at least its textbook lessons were often accompanied by filmstrips and other visual aids.         Math, on the other hand, was a monolith -- the dreaded subject. The one that sabotaged a report card, and made a minute seem like an hour.         Maybe the problem was that there was no one around like Terry Caliste to trivialize the subject	Jazzing up math is not new to television, but Caliste's one on one approach -- and his effervescent personality -- is. Describing his one-year-old TV show as "just me, the blackboard and the camera," he prefers the atmosphere of a simple classroom to a cartoon fantasyland.         "I avoid anything that students can't imitate -- no fancy computer images and graphics. If I had cute characters jumping all over the screen, that would be fine, but that's not what kids see when they do homework."         If you think one man in front of a blackboard can't hold a kid's attention, watching Caliste for a half hour may well change your mind. In lieu of special effects, he uses "a lot of eye contact and smiles. But a lot of it is just taking a positive approach."         The show is videotaped at the Brookdale Community College Learning Extension Center on Broadway, as Caliste likes its light brown blackboards. His potential audience jumped from 42,000 viewers on Monmouth Cablevision to 1.8 million across the state when Storer and CTN picked up on it. If he has a secret to making an unappealing subject seem like fun, it isn't a mysterious one.		"Basically, it's just seeing somebody else having fun," he says enthusuastically. "To see a guy really going off and having fun doing math is startling to some people. They tend to think, 'Well, maybe there's something about math I've missed -- it can't be that bad, look at that knucklehead."         You can do exactly that, every Monday at 4:30 p.m. on CTN, and every Thursday at 7:00 p.m. on Storer. He also conducts "Math A La Carte". workshop sessions for students in grades four through eight, and can be reached at 1-800-24LEARN.
"My message is : Math is okay, and when you really look at it, the stuff is trivial," says Caliste, a Monmouth College, math professor who is probably better known for his "Knowledge Base: math instructional show on Storer Cable, Monmouth Cablevision and the state-wide Cable Television Network (CTN). "My goal is to teach kids how to work smart, not hard. When I present a problem, I try and trivialize it and simplify it. If a kid says, 'I can't do math, he or she will live up to that. I teach kids to focus on the positive, to do it for themselves, not for mom or for me."         On television, Caliste is the teacher everybody always wanted -- engaging, fun to listen to, and most of all, excited about the subject. Dressed casually and talking to the camera as if it was skeptical student, Caliste offfers as much personality as he does information. "The problem is that most teachers are traditional, boring and mundane. A great teacher will teach you facts. And a bad teacher will teach you how not to teach."		Terry Caliste, host of the "Knowledge Base" cable TV show, belives that math isn't as hard vas it seems at first glance. His show is taped at the Long Branch Brookdale Extension, and is fuled by his enthusiasm and sense of humor. M. Czund photo

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