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| 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.
As Valerie Strauss explains in Stop
Telling Kids You’re Bad At Math. You are spreading math anxiety ‘like a virus’:
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.
