MisterY & Math-acognition

THE SUBJECT IN THIS CLASS IS NOT MATH, IT IS YOU I teach a course that is primarily populated with students who are new to our school.  They are mostly Freshman with a few Sophomores, both new and returning.  They also have typically struggled in mathematics prior to this course.  You can see it in their body language as they enter the room:  sitting as far away from the teacher or dry-erase board or as close to the escape hatch...I mean...door as possible.  As the class begins, they inhale deeply either with a straight spine and eyes wide open to see where the first blow will come from or possibly hunched over and avoiding eye contact in hopes of not being noticed.  These behaviors betray a truth that I fundamentally believe about all students: EVERY STUDENTS WANTS TO BE SUCCESSFUL How do we as teachers help students come out from behind their defenses and overcome their negative learned behaviors that we've had no part in building?  Can w...

By now, you are probably aware of the growing and convincing body of research that suggests that students will learn more, try harder, and demonstrate the positive attributes of a growth mindset when given feedback instead of grades.  Even when coupled together in a traditional grading system, students will ignore the feedback, focus on the grade, and make little attempt to improve or grow as they see the grade as a fixed condition.  As a result of this research it is now en vogue among the Twittersphere of education to promote the idea of a gradeless classroom in which the teacher gives only verbal or written feedback to the student instead of a grade.  Problem solved?  The new paradigm of education has arrived!  No more grades! Except, no.  I'm going to make up a statistic here so bear with me.  99.9% of teachers are still charged with giving a grade at some point (often frequent, regular points) in the school year.  They cannot unilaterally ...

Ok, quick little lesson on the difference between "necessary" and "sufficient."  It's a birthday party so what do you need?  How about candles?!  You can't have a birthday party without candles!  They're necessary .  But are they sufficient?  Can you serve only  candles?  Sure, if you want to have nobody show up to your next birthday party, just serve....candles.  Candles:  necessary but not sufficient. You decide that the cake will be chocolate.  Is it necessary that the cake be chocolate?  No.  It could be strawberry.  Or if you're particularly boring it could be vanilla (don't @ me).  Is the chocolate sufficient?  Yes.  If that's what is served, nobody is looking around for anything else.  But there are reasonable substitutes so chocolate is not necessary. Few things are both necessary and sufficient.  For a birthday party maybe friends would be both necessary and sufficient.  Nei...

As I alluded to in my previous post, "The Journey to Mathacognition," it is a feature of my classroom that ties together relationships, personalized learning, growth mindset, safe-spaces, risk, emotional learning, and reflection focused around the most important subject we teach:  the person sitting before us in the classroom. I'm going to explain it by taking you through how my students interacted with it.  On the second day of school, I shared with each student a Google-doc that asked them to finish the following prompts: 1) My emotional word association with math is.... 2) I am not successful with math when.... 3) I am successful with math when..... Each student gave their own responses on the document they shared with me.  (The next day, I took the words and made a word-cloud which we then turned into a bar graph, but that's tangential to the point!)  For each student I provided follow up questions.  For example: What leads you to being tired or f...

I had taught for about 15 years.  I had been a Department Chair at two boarding schools, in my fourth and last year at the second.  I had been praised and praised throughout my career as the math teacher who made math make sense for students.  Almost all of the classroom feedback I'd received throughout my professional career had been positive and affirming. Then one year I made a profound change.  I ditched the book, created my classes' homework and assessments, and installed a standards-based-grading platform.  The best students adapted just fine.  But the students for whom I had designed the course gave me mostly negative feedback.  They said they didn't like interleaved practice and assessments, being reassessed, and missed not having a book because they couldn't look up example problems.  I easily dismissed that last bit of criticism because the previous 13 years or so of teaching had taught me that students rarely, if ever, actually crack...

It's often said of schools and businesses that if you "show me your budget, I'll show you what you value."  If the school's budget reflects no financial commitment to a program, a space, or a teacher whose skill set equates to a certain value, it is natural to doubt the school's commitment to that value.  If a school says it's committed to having healthier students, show me what you're spending on healthy vs. less healthy lunch options.  If a school says it's committed to diversity, show me how it's measuring "diversity" and show me that it's investing in programs that promote and teachers that represent diversity. But imagine a school that chooses to demonstrate a commitment to health and wellness by hiring an H/W advisor…but locking that individual away in an office without consulting her about anything the school could do to advance student health and wellness.  The financial commitment is there, but it has no practical u...