Teaching students to love math

I love math. My parents spent hours on a near-daily basis with me doing math before even kindergarten, so I came into school knowing multiplication when most kids were learning how to count. It became something I was good at, too, which also helped immensely. Some combination of parental enthusiasm, early exposure, and a stress-free environment helped me succeed in mathematics. That is certainly not the norm though. Lack of exposure, poor teaching, mathophobia, and any number of factors (algebra 2 joke intended) lead to a lack of enthusiasm by the vast majority of students when it comes to math. The collective result is the United States math scores falling below the top-25 nations in the world.

My goal coming into this teaching experience was to pass my love for the logic and beauty of math onto my students. One of my personal friends asked the natural follow-up question: so how do you plan on getting them to love math? My short answer had four components, the first being to show excitement and be upbeat myself. People, and especially kids, are very attuned to the energy that someone gives off. If I’m visibly dragging through the day and the lessons, they are going to do the same. While I’m not the rah-rah cheerleader like the tour guide for our class’ recent college campus tour, my general positive energy in tutoring has helped me achieve this goal previously, so I aim to stick with that. These students noticed the tour guide’s enthusiasm when asked, so even if they don’t directly articulate it, they at least subconsciously notice their teacher’s energy.

Complementing students and giving them an opportunity to “show off” to the class if they do get the right answer are two more cruxes to helping associate math with enjoyment. Confidence is critical to success in anything. Math in particular can get difficult and annoying when someone does not understand it and loses confidence. It gets even worse when they start to fall behind. Recognizing students’ small achievements and patting them on the back is important.

If a student does fall behind, that’s where the final component of my strategy, one-on-one attention, comes in. Struggling is tough, and struggling alone is miserable. It’s a vicious cycle that can only be broken by showing the student that you care. Walking around the class after assigning problem sets is crucial to assessing and addressing individuals who are slower to pick up the material. Then, by giving one-on-one attention to someone, I can show that I care about their personal well-being and their achievement, I believe that will help students begin to love math. It can be an enjoyable struggle. Learning isn’t easy, I like to say. If it was easy, are you really learning something?

Sadly, it often isn’t this simple. For whatever reason, a student just might not be able to "love math" in the allotted time that I can teach them. My co-teacher, who has years of experience in high schools, said one thing that has stuck with me: yes, our personal goal may be to get a student to love math. Sometimes it just will not happen, and it’s important to recognize that our ultimate goal is just to get them to pass. There should be a clear hierarchy then of my two-fold goals mentioned in this blog’s inaugural post: first, get them to succeed (or pass), and second, help them love it as a subject. I’m not sure this mindset will help produce more STEM college majors and math/science professionals, but it’s what I have to work with at this moment.