Mathematically Motivated

Conquering Math Anxiety - The Power of Yay Math: Robert Ahdoot at TEDxAJU

"It's become my life's work to understand how and why people arrive to that reaction ("Uhhg.  I hate math!" expressed with anger and inadequacy) and tonight I'm going to share with you the solution to it."  Let's listen in:

(See the link to his "Yay Math" website in my blog/website links below).

Growth mindset is a trending term amongst educators, with legitimate reason: sometimes feeling overwhelmed with the Common Core Standards and assessments, new curricula, and growing teacher turnover can lead to pessimism, which seeps from teachers' thoughts to their actions and then directly to their students' attitudes.  Teachers and students both benefit, academically and emotionally, from maintaining a growth mindset and developing the teachable (and trainable) trait of optimism.

Developing GRIT takes time.  Lots of time.  However, teachers should start their students on the right foot by teaching, explicitly, that math is learned by making mistakes.  Positive attitudes and growth mindset help us learn from our mistakes; focusing our feelings on the "right" answer is actually the wrong way to do math.  

To demonstrate this, I would do some basic inquiry/discussion lessons where we, as a class, work together to solve a question whose type we may have never seen before.  I'll time us, explaining to students that the time we spend to try, try, try, reflect, and learn from mistakes will show that we're smarter mathematicians.  We should be the tortoise in this race, because it's not a race at all.

After each lesson, we would share how the lesson made us feel.  Feeling "smart" due to speed of answering would be a marker of misconceptions, and I would review that grit is a mathematician's trait that we need to work on and that speed can lead to frustration if we don't have that positive personality yet.  

The amount of time we spend on each day to solve a problem with mistakes would be charted.  Here's an example of how it could look, as created on Kids' Zone: Learning with NCES.  

I would explain to students that this isn't showing that we race to correct answers; instead, it demonstrates that the time we spend following Pólya's principles (Understanding the problem, making a plan, trying the plan, and reflecting on our successes or mistakes) focuses how we approach a problem and adds to our strategy tool box.  

Every time we work slowly and learn from mistakes, our toolbox collects more tools and our smiles stay firmly on our faces.  This type of behavior must be taught through modeling, practice, practice, practice, and also PRAISE, PRAISE, PRAISE while bringing the fun!