The Math Class Paradox
Mastering the subject has become less about learning and more about performance.
Why do so many students either hate math, fear it or both?
If you ask most students what they think their role is in math classrooms, they will tell you it is to get questions right. Students rarely think that they are in math classrooms to appreciate the beauty of mathematics, to ask deep questions, to explore the rich set of connections that make up the subject, or even to learn about the applicability of the subject; they think they are in math classrooms to perform. This was brought home to me recently when a colleague, Rachel Lambert, told me that her 6-year-old son had come home saying he didn’t like math; when she asked him why, he said that math was “too much answer time and not enough learning time.”
Students from an early age realize that math is different from other subjects. In many schools across the U.S., math is less about learning than it is about answering questions and taking tests—performing.
The testing culture in the U.S., which is more pervasive in math than other subjects, is a large part of the problem. When sixth-graders in my local district came home saying that they had a test on the first day of middle school, it was in one subject only: math. Most students and parents didn’t question whether a test was the right way to introduce a new year of mathematics. As one girl said to me, “Well, the teacher was just finding out what we know.” But why does this only happen in math? Teachers in history or English don’t give tests on the first day to find out what students know. And why do so many math teachers boil the subject down to producing short answers to narrow questions under pressure? It is no wonder that so many students decide mathematics is not for them.
In fact, it is not surprising that teachers test math all the time—in the last decade teachers’ jobs have come to depend on student performance on narrow state tests. The Common Core promises an improvement in the types of tests used—with questions that are less narrow and require thinking, instead of choosing a letter (A, B, C or D)—but the bigger problem is the testing culture in classrooms. It is not unusual for high-school math teachers to test children every week, communicating to students that they are constantly being evaluated.
Educators know that the most productive math-learning environments are those in which students receive positive messages about their unlimited potential and work on interesting and complex problems; in which they feel free to try ideas, fail, and revise their thinking. Students with a “growth” mindset are those who believe that their ability is not “fixed” and that failure is a natural part of learning. These are the students who perform at higher levels in math and in life. But students don’t get the opportunity to see math as a growth subject if they mainly work on short, closed questions accompanied by frequent tests that communicate to them that math is all about performance and there is no room for failure. When students inevitably struggle, most decide they are not a “math person.” The last decade has seen a nation of children emerge from our schools terrified of failing in math and believing that only some students can be good at it—those who can effortlessly achieve on narrow tests.
Teachers see some of the damage caused by our nation’s procedural and over-Why Growth Mindsets Are Necessary to Save Math Class - The Atlantic:
