A strange thing has been happening in my workshops. People are getting really excited about solving problems. Now this isn’t really a surprise when I’m talking about workshops with math teachers. I would hope they would be excited to do some math. No, I’m talking about the non-math teachers—those that teach something boring like social …
My favorite thing about Jo Boaler’s course “How to Learn Math” so far has been the assigned reading. She assigned Paul Lockhart’s “A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form.” I think this should be required reading for anyone who teaches math, supervises the teaching of …
“It’s easy. Let me help you.” Ok. Maybe that’s not the worst thing you can say to a student, but it’s up there. Yet, well-intentioned teachers and parents say it all the time. Why? For starters, the problem is easy to us. We don’t understand why a student is struggling with something that seems so …
The worst thing you can say to a student struggling in math Read More »
When Angela Duckworth was a NYC math teacher she noticed something that I think will sound familiar to most teachers: it wasn’t always her most talented students that performed best in her class. She had a hunch that there was some quality that made those students successful and that doing well in school and life …