I was reading another blog post today (The Myth of ‘I’m Bad at Math’) and had a line stick out to me describing what it takes to succeed in
a math class: “For high-school math,
inborn talent is much less important than hard work, preparation, and
self-confidence.”
I’d like to expand on that.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some variation of
“Wow – I couldn’t do that.” From
telling people I was a Math major to telling people I now teach Math and
Physics, it’s almost always the same.
“Whew – I wasn’t good
at math.”
“You must be crazy.”
“Good for you.”
“I’ve never been able
to do well at math.”
“You must be really
smart.”
While I pridefully relish the idea that I’m inherently intelligent,
that’s just not true. I’m not particularly smarter than most. I just worked at
it.
The heart of the matter is that math is hard until you
practice it. To get good at identifying the domain and range of a function, you
have to have some experience doing it. But almost everything is that way. I
can’t pick up a golf club and instantly get a hole-in-one. I likely couldn’t
even be anywhere near on par. But if I took 15 minutes a day to practice,
eventually I could. Why should we expect any less from math?
But that only covers part of the story – the hard
work and preparation. Let’s talk about self-confidence.
For my classroom, I’d like to think I can push students to
work hard and hold them to standards of preparedness, but I have much less
influence on their self-confidence. I do my best to praise accomplishments and
minimize the focus on error. I structure material so they can make lots of small
victories until they’re ready to tackle big victories. Yet, one negative
influence can undo the work of many positive influences.
I believe having an adult say “I was terrible at math” is one of the most disheartening things a
student struggling in math can hear. In this one little sentence, there’s two
messages to a struggling student: 1) someone they see as smart struggled in
math and 2) they don’t even use math anymore. I’m not sure you could kill
self-confidence quicker.
(Now, I do realize
that for a student doing well in math, hearing someone say “I was terrible at
math” can give them a boost of encouragement, but for this post we’re less
concerned with those students – they’re already doing well.)
So, if you’re talking to a student about math, I’d love it
if you’d focus on the “work hard and be confident” bit.
