I have a pretty strong memory of the first math lesson I ever taught. If I close my eyes I can picture the room, although many of the faces are a bit fuzzy at this point. There are six neat rows of desks, each with five single-student desks. All of the desks face the front, and eager 7th grade students fill each one. I hand out a quarter sheet of blank paper to each student and ask them to write a sentence or two about their experience with math in elementary school. Once they write down their responses I confidently say “Crumple up the paper and throw it in the trash! This is a new year, and you get to write a new math story for yourself. This year will be different!”. The students excitedly ball up their paper metaphor and hurl it towards the large trash bin I borrowed from the custodian. Students are smiling. I’m excited. Attitudes are positive and refreshed.
What a lying liar I was.
Pretty much nothing I did in my first year was “new” or “different”. I was barely making it through each day, and I relied on what I had experienced as a student and what my colleagues told me to do.
I didn’t innovate. I didn’t trail blaze. I survived. Almost every lesson was the same format, since it was all I knew how to do. I wrote notes on the overhead projector with my set of 4 Vis-a-Vis pens, and the students sat there and copied the notes down in their notebooks. If we finished the lesson early they could start their homework, or we might play a game.
Thrilling.
Any educator with at least a decade of experience can definitely look back and think of some teaching strategies or “not-so-best practices” they used to use and feel a huge sense of cringe. Here are my top 3.
1) The Cold Call
One job that I thankfully have never had to endure is that of the cold calling salesman. The thought of randomly calling a name on a list and trying to sell them something raises my anxiety level to DEFCON 3. Forget the concept of knocking on a random person’s door and being like, “Do I have a food storage system for you!”. Just… no. I cannot do it. If that’s the case, then why was I fine with randomly calling on students in the middle of my lesson, just hoping they would know the answer and be confident enough to say it out loud?
It is my belief that when you cold call on a “random” student, it’s almost never really random (unless you are using some kind of truly random system, such as a random number generator). Unconscious bias (or maybe even conscious, if we are truly being honest) leads you to choose students you know are not paying attention, or those who are less likely to raise their hand. It works more as a classroom management/punishment strategy than it does a method of eliciting knowledge and vigorous classroom debate. It’s a negative method of keeping students “engaged” and “paying attention”, not because the lesson is so engaging, but because students are fearful that they might be randomly called on and possibly look foolish in front of their peers.
Have I used this in the past? Absolutely. Do I still do it now? Sadly, sometimes. Old habits die hard. Edutopia’s article this past April tackles this topic in more detail, and suggests 8 ways to make this a more positive strategy. It is my hope that I remove this strategy from my daily teaching practice once and for all. I strive for a classroom where students work in teams to tackle challenging, engaging thinking tasks that foster rich discussion that students want to be a part of. If you have to force them to participate or pay attention, the lesson isn’t good.
2) The Hunger Games
Middle school introduces many new social situations to children that are inherently anxiety inducing. The convergence of two or more 6th grade student groups, all with their own ingrained social dynamics, can cause friend groups to splinter and crumble. Many students begin their first forays into dating (mostly via text message over a hormone flooded 24-hour period). For some kids just the act of changing clothes for P.E. can be terrifying. Every day, possibly every hour, can introduce a new stressful social scenario. Knowing this, why did I ever let students choose their own groups?
When I first started assigning group projects I would always begin by trying to hook the students with an engaging introduction to get them excited about the work. One of my favorite projects was when I had my 7th grade students design their own homes. I handed out model home floor plans, discussed the budget they would have, and how many square feet they could use. No matter how hard I tried, however, students would start to do the social mental math and try to figure out who they could work with. Eyes darted across the room, making contact with possible partners. Many groups would be chosen non-verbally before I even presented the rules. Invariably, some students would be left out.
Heterogeneous, homogeneous, teacher chosen, student chosen. It honestly doesn’t matter. All of the traditional methods of choosing groups include bias, either by the teacher or the students. When the teacher chooses heterogeneous groups strategically, students tend to assign themselves roles based on their own self-perception. “James is in this group, and he has an A in the class, so he is meant to be the leader. I’ll just stay quiet then”. Peter Liljedahl discusses this phenomenon at length in his book Building Thinking Classrooms (and I discuss it in more depth here). A homogeneous group frequently lacks diversity of thought. When students choose their own groups all sorts of social factors come into play, which almost certainly disadvantages some individual students (in my experience, students on the Autism spectrum and neurodivergent thinkers often get left out by their peers).
I choose to select groups as randomly as possible. The Picker Wheel app makes all of my groups completely random, and I spin the wheel in front of the whole class. Whether we work at the vertical thinking stations, sit in table groups, or convene for a large project, I let the random number generator decide. This removes much of the social anxiety of students finding their own groups, and absolves me of any bias I might bring. Yes, students still get grouped with others they don’t get along with at times, but part of life is learning how to work with others. Let fate take the wheel!
3) The Ticking Time Bomb
One of the most common Hollywood tropes is that of the ticking time bomb. The hero discovers the nefarious device and must frantically work to figure out how to disarm it. If they are lucky, the hero has a knowledgeable colleague on the other end of an earpiece calmly giving detailed instructions. At the very last moment, the hero cuts the correct wire and the day is saved. Hooray.
This type of actual bomb scenario pretty much never happens in real life. Yet, educators across the country (including my early teaching self) recreate this same situation on a daily basis with their students when teaching mathematics. How, you ask? Well, it’s our old friend the “Timed Fact Test”.
In an effort to instill math fluency, thousands of educators every day give hundreds of thousands of students little sheets of math fact problems that they must complete in a certain amount of time. Some even have elaborate reward systems for students who reach certain time benchmarks. I even remember doing this as an elementary school student, with my 6th grade teacher adding in the caveat of saying random numbers out loud while we worked to throw us off even more. I honestly can’t think of a worse teaching strategy.
I also can’t believe I used to do this in my own classroom. Now, in my room it wasn’t basic math facts, but rather perfect squares up to 625 and certain formulas such as volume of a cylinder or area of a trapezoid. I printed out half sheets of paper and gave students two minutes to complete them by memory.
Why two minutes? Hell if I know.
Did they really need to memorize those numbers and formulas? Nope. The internet exists.
Why did I do that? I have no clue.
How much anxiety and trauma did I cause students every Friday when I gave those tests? No way to tell, but it’s not zero, that’s for sure.
Jo Boaler’s article in 2012 suggests “timed tests are the direct cause of the early onset of math anxiety” and that “Math anxiety affects about 50 percent of the U.S. population…” If we have known this for more than a decade, why are we still doing it? Searching the phrase “math facts fluency timed tests” on Teachers Pay Teachers gives over 2,700 search results.
Ask yourself this question. When was the last time in your life that you had to do quick mental math under great pressure. I’ll wait. The only time I encounter this in my life is when I play Dungeons & Dragons, and even then I’m not being timed. Yes, I need to do some mental math to add my dice rolls. No, I’m not timed nor is there a dire consequence if I am slow.
Yes, math fluency is important. The better a student’s fluency is, the more time and space their brain has for tougher cognition tasks when they get to subjects like percentages, fractions, algebra, and beyond. Do timed tests develop and assess fluency? No. They only create frustration and anxiety, which makes math even harder for students to learn.
I stopped giving timed memorization tests around 2017 (yes, I was also late to the party). They will never happen in my classroom again. There are no bombs about to go off in the classroom. Let’s stop acting like there are.
Those are my greatest teaching strategy regrets. Care to share yours in the comments? Own your shame, knowing that we are always doing our best, but also always looking to learn and improve.
P.S. – To all of my former students who I gave timed tests to: I’m sorry. Please forgive me.
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