Thursday, May 12, 2016

Don't Hate Math

image from iClipart for Schools

Who remembers the timed tests that showed who the fastest person at math facts were? Twenty-five years ago, I remember sitting in a classroom surrounded by students who were rushing through trying to compute math facts at a rapid pace and get the whole sheet completed in under a minute. I wasn’t a student who struggled, but I was a friend to many of the underdogs.
Our education system was set up for ranking of students and not to appreciate the growth. Even students who may go from completing one problem to solving two problems in a minute have made 100% growth – and by simply assigning correct versus incorrect we’re not showing students that with effort, they can be good at math.

Mathematics surrounds us, yet we have become accustomed to avoiding numerical thinking at all costs. There is no doubt that bad high school teaching and confusing textbooks are partly to blame. But a more pernicious habit does the most damage. We are perpetuating damaging myths by telling ourselves a few untruths: math is inherently hard, only geniuses understand it, we never liked math in the first place and nobody needs math anyway.

Too often, especially in adult education, we see the students come in to our classes with the conviction that “I’m not good at math.” As adult educators, it’s our job to help students see that they can be good, even great, at math. Gone are the days when the teacher’s way of solving a problem is the only way to solve a problem. I hear it every day from one of our high school completion instructors – “If you have a question, or a different way to solve a problem, please share. It’s likely that someone else has the same question or will benefit from seeing a different way to solve the problem.” Let’s embrace the uniqueness that we each have and show students that they really can be great at math.


As for those timed-tests in math, I’m not sure I’ve used them very much – especially since I can carry a calculator with me nearly everywhere I go. 

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