Teaching At Its Best
A Small Victory in Math Class

A Small Victory in Math Class


Teaching at the middle school level is, in an understated nutshell, challenging. The successes are often few and far between, and the students seem to move on so quickly that it seems that as soon as you get to know a group of students, they have moved on to high school. Add into the equation that I teach math, and what qualifies as teaching success can look from the outside like anything but.

Successes there have been, though! A number of years ago I had a student, Adam, who, like many students in my 8th grade Pre-Algebra classes, proclaimed a disdain for all things math early and often. I prefer not to argue this point with any students, but instead try to gradually draw them into activities that seem to not be math at all. But Adam saw it coming and refused to put pencil to paper in my class at all. I chatted with his other teachers and heard of similar behavior, though generally less strident. I kept offering up opportunities for Adam to participate and to at least do some work to make the time pass more quickly, but saw little forward progress.

I am lucky enough to teach my math classes every day within a block schedule, meaning I have a lot of time to meander my way through the curriculum, taking digressions meant to draw students into participating. And, usually, before they know it, it is actual grade-level math they are unwittingly doing. Not so for Adam. He was a smart and stubborn kid, and he could sense when I was trying to sneak math onto his desk. His stamina was impressive. He deftly parried my early attempts, and so I retreated, and began planning an alternate, hopefully more surreptitious, approach to slip any kind of pattern recognition work in front of him.

Thus, I was shocked at his parent-teacher conference when his parents told me that he had set a goal for himself to “learn his times tables” by the end of the year. Knowing the multiplication facts is, of course, far from 8th grade level material, but this was a clear victory! After picking my jaw off the floor, I patted myself on the back that I had eventually worn him down, and he decided to simply do some of the work to get me to stop my increasingly corny attempts at subterfuge.

I played it cool, of course, avoiding any but the most modest compliments, afraid that too much direct approval might feel to him like I was taking a self-congratulatory victory lap and scare him off. But there was obvious forward progress. Adam was far from perfect, of course, rarely doing more than the bare minimum, but he gradually participated more and more and refused to do work less and less. By the middle of the year, I could count on him more often than not to start on his work with little or no prompting from me. He was still far from at grade level, but boy did he work hard whenever the work involved multiplication!

This guest article was written by Caleb Wilkinson while taking the course Resilient School Leaders by THI instructor Mary Ann Johnson.



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