Thoughts from the classroom

I started really thinking about our attitudes towards mathematics while I was doing a Duolingo program the other day. I recently started a new teaching job at a charter school in Liberty County, Texas, called International Leadership of Texas. All students of all races are required to take yearly courses in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese from the time they are in elementary school until graduation. By the time they leave high school, most of our students are fluent in all three languages.

So what does this have to do with Math? Well, my third graders informed me that if they have to learn all three languages, so do I. The fact that I’m already trilingual didn’t matter, and it did not appear as if they were giving me a suggestion, either. Anyone that teaches elementary school knows what a force of nature a group of 8-year old kids with their minds made up is, so I’m learning Spanish and Chinese. One of the first Chinese phrases that comes up is “I don’t like Math.” I rolled my eyes and kept trying to memorize the hanzi for all the words.

我不喜欢数学, for the record.

However, 我喜欢数学, I happen to like math. (See how I took out that second character? I’m proud of me.) It made me think of how everyone seems to hate math, and why. I think it’s ingrained in our very being from an early age. You’re an elementary kid, and your favorite uncle comes up and sees you doing your math homework. “Oh, you’re doing math? I hope you’re better at it than me. I’m terrible at math!”

What did the kid hear? “Uncle so-and-so is terrible at math. He can’t be bad at anything because he’s an adult and smart and knows everything, so I bet this is REALLY hard.” The process is starting already, and the kid isn’t doing anything harder than 2+2=4. They eventually hear this so much, that they assume they’re messing the math up even when they completely understand it. There is no chance to build up confidence. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is just round one of the fight. A series of jokes that inadvertently kills a student’s confidence, a mistake that no one is even aware that they are making. Math MUST be hard and a struggle. This causes the development of what researchers call “math anxiety”. The bad news is, this is an issue that teachers have no control over, except in our own attitudes. How do we combat this?

First, we can control how we teach math. I am mentioning this, but I want to be clear that I think education is making great strides in how we are handling this. There has been issues in the past where we don’t teach our students to visualize math. It starts from elementary school when kids are told to “carry the one” or “regroup”, but then we don’t tell them why. We just say to trust us, it’ll work. This occurred even when I was in the Navy in the Nuclear Power Training Program, the toughest education program in the U.S. Military. Some things were dismissed by saying “push the ‘I believe’ button”, or “just accept that it’s PFM.” (PFM means pure f…… magic. It’s the Navy. Use your imagination here, I’m not paying my mom’s cuss jar.) If you know what you’re doing, math is completely visual. We need to teach the “why” and not just tell them to believe it. If the kids know why something works, then they can build off it to jump to the next step. Teach them to visualize the concept, to derive the formulas, and make inferences that take them to the next level. Math is not a process of memorization, it is a process of problem solving and unraveling a puzzle.

Second, and arguably the most important issue contributing to math anxiety is that our students are terrified to make mistakes. Being comfortable with being “constructively wrong” is the biggest skill in education we can teach our students. Mistakes are great, because that is how we learn. This is incredibly hard to teach our kids, because of peer pressure. All kids are afraid of being made fun of by all the others, and this makes them not willing to step out of their comfort zone and take risks. Not only do we have to promote the self-esteem that it takes to do so, but we have to promote our classroom as a safe space for risk-taking. In order to do this, we must teach our students to respect each other and encourage each other. We also need to cultivate an environment in our classrooms where students aren’t afraid to ask us questions. We must treat all students with respect. The students cannot learn from us if we treat them badly or make them feel like they are incapable of learning. I won’t even go into how I feel the current obsession with constant testing contributes to the fear of making mistakes. How can we teach our kids that we learn from our mistakes when they are constantly being penalized for those mistakes? Testing is important, but not like this. Our kids are more than a test.

I honestly think that we are making great strides in developing teaching methods that are effective in combating math anxiety. Our world is rapidly becoming a smaller place because of humanity’s technological gains, and our students will have to have the knowledge to keep up in this world. Our nation cannot keep up with others in STEM education so long as we have this attitude of “math is hard” and thinking that only a very special few are capable of understanding it. We are all capable of understanding, and we need to encourage our students and make them understand how capable they are. That is the most important part of their education. The other subjects like math and Chinese will follow naturally.