My Son Takes the Year Off from Math, and His Teacher is OK
By Sarah Lahm.
I need to thank my son’s teacher for loving him, even when it seems like an impossible task.
She called me the other day, to say he had disappeared for about thirty minutes during school. She hadn’t been able to find him, and then, when she did, she told him he couldn’t come to the YMCA with the rest of the class, as planned, to go swimming.
After I swallowed hard, feeling shame and dread creep up my throat (there have been quite a few phone calls home this year), I thanked her for not letting him go swimming with the class. He has to learn, we both agreed, that he can’t run off like that.
As I suspected, he had run out of class to avoid the day’s math lesson. Trying to teach my boy math, we’ve learned, turns him into a sad, frustrated, angry kid who feels cornered and defeated.
He has math anxiety. I think he developed it last year, when his regular teacher was gone on a leave of absence, and the substitute teacher–who meant well, I am sure–brought a different kind of pressure to bear on the kids than his regular teacher did. The substitute kept the kids in from recess because “they had so much (math) work to catch up on,” and pushed the kids to plow through a bunch of work in order to be on schedule with the Minneapolis Public Schools’ “Focused Instruction” approach, which revolves around frequent benchmark testing.
I cannot say for sure this is what caused my son’s anxiety around math to develop, but it has gotten worse this year.
Thankfully, he has a teacher who knows him very well, or at least tries to. He is an expert button-pusher, and can be tough, stubborn, and disruptive, yet also sweet, kind, and funny. He can read and spell very well, and My Son Takes the Year Off from Math, and His Teacher is OK - Living in Dialogue:
