Math's Need for Speed

Professor Jo Boaler, of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, says, “Mathematics education in the United States is broken.” I can’t get her recent Atlantic Magazine article, “The Stereotypes That Distort How Americans Teach and Learn Math” off my mind. It has been sitting in an open tab on my browser since it was published in mid-November. 

In the article, Professor Boaler goes on to write that math classes have focused too much on “procedure execution” instead of embracing a far broader curriculum including making connections, working visually, and problem-solving. Boaler even challenges the idea that there is such a thing as a “math person.”

However, the part of the article that resonates the most for me is at the end of the article:

“Another problem addressed by the Common Core is the American idea that those who are good at math are those who are fast. Speed is revered in math classes across the U.S., and students as young as five years old are given timed tests—even though these have been shown to create math anxiety in young children. Parents use flash cards and other devices to promote speed, not knowing that they are probably damaging their children’s mathematical development. At the same time mathematicians point out that speed in math is irrelevant. One of the world’s top mathematicians, Laurent Schwartz, reflected in his memoir that he was made to feel unintelligent in school because he was the slowest math thinker in his class. But he points out that what is important in mathematics “is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant.” It is fortunate for Schwartz, and all of us, that he did not grow up in the speed- and test-driven classrooms of the last decade that have successfully dissuaded any child that thinks deeply or slowly from pursuing mathematics or even thinking of themselves as capable. " 

"The U.S. does not need fast procedure executors anymore. We need people who are confident with mathematics, who can develop mathematical models and predictions, and who can justify, reason, communicate, and problem solve. We need a broad and diverse range of people who are powerful mathematical thinkers and who have not been held back by stereotypical thinking and teaching. Common Core mathematics, imperfect though it may be, can help us reach those goals.”

Why must content-driven high school courses force students to demonstrate what they know quickly? Why do teachers insist on writing tests that challenge students’ ability to complete them? How does a child’s ability to move quickly demonstrate her academic skills?

In all fairness, math is not alone in subjecting students to speed testing. Many disciplines do it. However, it seems to accompany those subject areas that want kids to memorize facts, formulas, or procedures. From a Bloom perspective, it is always the lower level thinking skills of knowing, remembering, and applying that are the focus of these kinds of “objective” tests. What about evaluating, synthesizing, creating, or analyzing? Yeah, those don’t work as well on multiple choice Scantron tests. 

Do you work well when you are forced to move quickly? Do you do your best when the amount of work you have to do will not fit in the amount of time you have to do it? Want to be judged on the tasks you had to rush through? Why make kids do that?

When my children have struggled on tests, it is often not about the material or their preparation that has been the issue. It has been about finishing the test! Is that one of the targets of the course: be able to regurgitate at warp speed?

When a test is so long and difficult that kids must rush to finish, it a set up for failure.  Is it a realistic or reasonable assessment of their learning? What would we lose and what would we gain if students could take as much time as they needed to complete these tests and even had time to double check their responses?

We’d get a much more accurate measure of what they have learned!

A Bad Pick Up Line

I walk to school. When I arrive in the morning, a steady stream of cars drop off kids for early class, meetings with teachers, and other activities. When I leave in the afternoon, the line of cars is so long that it encircles the parking lot. Parents will sit in their car for a half hour or more waiting for their children to come out.

I am baffled. Why are they there? Why are they picking up their children as soon as school lets out?

The line is long at 3:15. The line disappears by 3:30 or 3:35. Why sit and wait that long? For that matter, why not let your child take the bus, walk, or ride a bike home?

Of course, sometimes there is a doctor appointment, skating lesson, or other obligation. But the number of cars waiting at the end of the day is far too many for those kind of periodic tasks.

Our school has over ninety clubs and sixty sports. Some of these require auditions or try outs, but a vast majority of them are open to all students. A handful meet in the morning before school starts, but a most activities and teams meet between 3:15 and 6pm after the class day has ended.

I want to knock on windows as I walk past the row of cars and ask, “Why are you here? Why are you picking up a child who should be able to find his or her own way home? Why isn’t your child involved after school?”

As a teacher of freshmen, I work hard to connect my students to our school’s co-curricular program of activities and athletics. Although there are no grades or transcripts for what happens in the afternoon, for many of my students, and many of us, sports, performing arts, clubs, and other activities were the real reason we went to school. They were also where we learned lessons that we carried into adulthood. The people with whom we spent time after school became our closest friends.

This is what the students who leave school at 3:15 are losing. Do they know how much they are missing? Are their parents who facilitate their departure aware of this price?

Yes, yes, yes: I play a spring sport, so in the fall I go home and several times a week, I work out or play with a club. I have a job. I go to youth group. That’s great. I don’t believe that the enormous line of cars is filled, even partially filled with these kids. The line is way too long.

High school is about more than classes. For many kids, classes are the gateway to the fun and wonderful things that happen after the final bell rings and the real love of learning begins. To deprive a student of this opportunity, even under the guise of helping them get home, sparing them bus embarrassment, or making their life easier, is to deny them a key component of their development.

Don’t pick your kids up after school! Don’t make it easy to get home. Do help them find their after school home. Do push them to join a club, be on or backstage, play a sport, or help with the countless events that occur all afternoon and into the evening at most high schools.

One my favorite aphorisms from Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love is “Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy”. Here is my corollary: Don’t pick them up after school!