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!