1. Acknowledge your Feelings 2. Adopt a Growth Mindset 3. Practice Regularly 4. Use Real-Life Examples 5. Build Confidence Gradually Supportive resources are key with each of these steps.
1. Acknowledge your Feelings
Start by admitting how you feel about math - no judgement! Being aware of your emotions is an important step, because once you LABEL and IDENTIFY emotions, you can tackle it head-on. I have seen countless anxious students lost in a sea of emotions. These are : • memorizing multiplication tables • fractions • factoring • "thinking TIPS" level questions • math contest Math requires thinking clarity. It is impossible to think clearly when feelings have paralyzed your brain. I suffered from math anxiety well into my career. Anxiety magnifies when you're on the stage and people are wondering about your ability as a teacher. I faked it until I made it. I remember trying to prove the quadratic formula in front of the class, forgetting the next step. I faked it and kept going, making further mistakes, digging myself into a set of nested mistakes. I was sweating, I could hear my heart beat, and my voice was shaking. How did I make it through? By admitting my mistake. Being honest with my students and myself. It gives a free slate to start from and I was able to correct my mistake the next day with some proper studying. Faking it "worked", but it's an inefficient way of learning how to deal with emotions. It took years of practice to gain confidence and experience. It's been a process, but what really helped was my practice in mindfulness. I am watching a few of my students fake it. I know it well, because I did it for many years. I've been trying to teach a few students to identify and work with their feelings. It's a combination of practice, confidence, but most importantly - mindfulness. I've suggested and personally use Andrew Huberman's Physiological Sigh (deep inhale + extra inhale, then deep exhale + extra exhale) as well as "6-6 breathing" which works on activating the vagus nerve. It's been an interesting year, and I have to step it up as many of my students will be taking exams for the first time! This completes part 1) of Conquering Math Anxiety. Zooming out, I feel the 5-step process outlined above can be applied to learning anything. Do any of these steps resonate with you? Part 2 coming up soon!
This is a post that I started pre-covid, but never finished. I just came back to my blog, and saw it 'under drafts'. Here it is, just for a record:
Metacognition, the awareness of one’s own thinking processes, is something that some of my students lack.
I saw it in my students from summer school. There was a dearth of metacognition especially amongst my students who are weaker in mathematics.
My fellow grade 10 academic colleague have tried to address this problem through a short series of assessment wrappers and assignments based on their most recent quiz/test.
In the beginning of the year, we spent 3 days reviewing grade 9 mathematics and trying to look at the big picture of what was taught last year. It is often easy when learning things for the first time to get lost looking at the tree when there's a whole forest to be discovered. Looking at mathematics again a year later gives a chance to see the course as a whole. It also lets them reflect on what information they retained, and what was and wasn't so easy to recall. We were able to discuss how the mind forgets, but can easily relearn what they learned well. It is also worth reflecting on what concepts wasn't so easy to recall.
We did a short half hour diagnostic of grade 9 material after the 3 days of learning. As soon as a student finished, we completed something called an "assessment wrapper" - one of my favourite things I learned from my colleague 10 years my junior. It comes in many forms (as you may google and find out), but the one I did was have students go to the side of the room where there were solutions and a red pen available and reflect.
After a linear systems quiz, students were to make corrections and write a short comment for helpful feedback for themselves. Then they need to choose one particular question they did wrong, and go into depth displaying some metacognition.
Reflection is considered one of the core processes of being a mathematician. I have to learn to emphasize it more. And how do I emphasize it? By evaluating what I value.
The Covid crisis forced my teaching to change quickly. I was used to reading “data” in-class and adjusting to my students’ needs in real-time.
I miss using body language data to scaffold student learning to help facilitate their understanding. I enjoy reacting to this real -time data — giving wait time to their quizzical looks as they process a question, offering guiding questions in response to frustrated faces, and then celebrating their “aha” moments of understanding.
I cherish building a classroom community — talking about things other than mathematics and eventually looping this data back into creating a story or joke for our own unique classroom.
I appreciate being able to easily identify student disengagement — the ones who found an easier dopamine rush than a math problem in whipping out their phone to see if they got more likes on their last Instagram post.
I relish acting on this data — creating teachable moments — having students reflect on their behaviour and consider the opportunity cost of their actions. I miss it so much that I would recreate a lame version of it in the middle of my remote learning lesson.
I am used to reading such a rich set of analog data every day. Instead, I receive digital data through activities — inclusion activities, weekly reflections, and small surveys. I get to literally read how they feel, what they found effective, what they dislike, and how long they watched my videos.
Here is an example of a recent exit card survey where students were asked to ‘rank’ eight different aspects of the distance learning using 1 (least important) to 8 (most important).
Part 1 of the survey results asking students to rank the importance of aspects of distance learning.
Part 2 of the survey results asking students to rank the importance of aspects of distance learning.
This comes as no surprise — students find the video lessons to be the most important aspect, followed by their assignments, (AKA: summative google form assessments) and finally followed up by their homework.
This is the traditional way of teaching and learning mathematics — watch a lesson, practice the “home”work, and then get assessed on it. This is something I’ve been slowly getting away from the last few years — and resorted back to (for now) given the pandemic situation.
The students say the video is the most important aspect — but what do the numbers say?
Distance learning has produced 157 hours of watch time and 1400 views. In-class learning would produce 540 hours of watch time and 1624 views . (Calculations assumed the same 9 days, 30 minute lessons , and full attendance — 540 hours of watch time and 1624 views.)
It’s important to put some sort of context with these numbers so I decided to compare them with my ‘average’ in-class numbers:
Views: Distance Learning (1400 views) vs In-Class Views (1624 views)
The disparity in watch time could be caused by the fact that students pick and choose what they want to watch in a video. The average view duration is shorter than the actual duration of the video lesson. (see below) You will see that students are watching as little as 30% up to 60% of a lesson. Students weren’t actually watching much of the videos even though they rank it as the most important aspect of the distance learning.
The average view duration of top viewed videos and the percentage of the video that’s been watched.
Another interesting tidbit in the above photo is the number of views. I only have 58 students, yet my views of these videos were well over 58. It supported multiple anecdotal statements about distance learning math:
This could explain why the average view time was shortened — were students going back to re-watch certain aspects of the video? Apparently — yes. This observation is confirmed on a larger sample size with Khan Academy.
To further probe how my students were faring with distance learning, I asked the students to rank how well they were learning math before the quarantine vs afterwards. Be aware that below is a sample size that only consists of the 38/58 engaged learners and is asked 6 weeks into distance learning.
Graphically, there is a lot more spread in terms of how students are faring with distance learning.
Taking a closer look — students on average rated in class learning one rating higher than distance learning. In other words, if a student rated a “6” for in-class learning of mathematics, they will on average reduce it to a “5” for distance learning.
One student went from a 10 rating (in class)down to a 3 (remote learning)
One student went from a 3 rating (in class) up to a 9 (remote learning)
Moving forward, there is much to learn for myself. In the short term, we may be continuing this distance learning for summer school, and I have to continue to find ways of helping students learn.
In the long term, there is talk of an increased use of a blended learning model as the advantages of technology are becoming increasingly apparent. The key is to find out what aspects of in-class learning are vital and identifying areas where technology can augment learning.
