Chapter 4 - Amber Hill Experiences & Reflections

First, congratulations to Sharon for leading and delivering a very organized and interesting discussion on Chapter 4. The class led to some particular issues that I wanted to bring forth here in my blog.

Our discussion and Boaler's research provided to really reflect on how much "learned helplessness" we are disabling our students with. I pictured myself there as Tim in the math class, embarassed that I too perhaps acted out very much like he did some of the time. I knew students in my class were distracted, they weren't listening. I waled around my classroom as students worked from their textbooks adn instead of asking them to really think hard about the problem I would end up helping many of the weaker students out by providing a receipe - a step by step set of instructions to get them through the problem successfully. Did I do that out of pity for the students who I though just couldn't get it? Was it just to satisfy my own frustrations with the students who couldn't learn from my teaching? (What is wrong with them, they couldn't learn from me - I taught it clearly, didn't I???) In the end my leading questions, my coaxing, my ignoring of wrong answers, and my endless lists of rules and algorithms did nothing for those who never really got it the first time around. My way of teaching was not working for those who needed it to work, who depended on it to work. I was in such a panic to in getting through the work, in meeting the deadlines that I rarely afforded my students time to really think and grapple with the problems I had given them to consider. I look back now and shamefully realize how many things I was doing wrong in my class, that was really to their detriment. Why didn't I see it then? Why did I do the things I did? We are addicted to teaching the way we are. It has become so ingrained within us that change seems almost incomprehensible.

Hilary's teaching of trigonometry also send me back to the past, questioning if my teachign was as ineffecitve as hers, if I ended up confusing my students more with enless rules to remeber and unclear explainations all in an attempt to give my students a procedure to learn . Now ina ll honesty, my students probably did not develop a clear sense of what the rules meant, where they came from, or how they related to different situations they encountered. Three years later, and after many mistakes, Boaler and our discussions made me realize that I, like Amber Hill teachers, are "driven by a desire to compartmentalize and provide models and structures that make sense for teachers but often do not for students" (p. 32). We are driven by the race against the clock, against ourselves - trying to pass a test that we are set up to fail. Given the structure we have in place, all of us as teachers, really are set up for failure. We will not cover all the curriculumt he way we want to, we will not meet all our students needs the way we know they need us. Then, we blame ourselves and the system. Every year it's the same routine. But really, do we try to change it? Sure we do, we go faster, assign less questions, further falsely exemplying the myth that mathematics is all about speed. We, too, end up lowering our expectations.

During the discussion in class I raised the notion if we as educators do expect less of ourselves and our students if we are teaching in a socio-economically deprived school versus an urban setting where parents are generally more educated and achievenments are often higher? Is the bar lower in the working class, rural schools? Are we satisfied with minimum successes in our math classes if we know we won't be held as accountable? One thing is for sure though, the students often meet us where we hold the bar.

Hearing the students voices through the quotatiosn Boaler presents here really gives us a wake up call that students do want change. The only ones standing in the way of this change, is us. We hear from our students on a regular basis, the brighter ones too, that the work is boring, monotonous, yet we continue to stuff it to them, we continue to stay the course - all int he name of perceived success in testing. I knew my most intelligent students were extremely bored within my grade 9 class. It was not until late in my second year of teaching that I really realized students apperciate and develop cognitive thinking at a higher level when their work is made enoyable. We dubbed the day long math workshop for our students "Math Fun Day" and in groups scattered about our gym they were givena series of small projects from the four main topic they studied in the previous months. I finally seen so many of my students happy, but also engaged, inquisitive, and relaxed. They remakred to be after that the stress of assessments had entirely left them. They were learning the concepts I tried beating into their heads with boards and books simply by using their hands with tangible products. They still made mistakes but they laughed them off and reflected on why their project results didn't turn out as they had hypothesized. Then I knew assignments and tests handed back with red ink all over them really didn't result in students reflecting on why they went wrong, really didn't correct the mistakes students made, really didn't improve their interest or their learning.

With the images and thoughts resurfacing from that math fun day Boaler brought back to life many ideas that I questioned back then too. How useful are time-on-tasks as an everyday lesson plan for mathematical learning? To what extent does our obsession with keeping students quiet and orderly play in inhibiting real learning from taking place? Like Keith (p.41), as soon as many of our students enter the classroom and open their textbooks they are switched off. The rule following can't be helping either. The cue-based teachign we transmit is doing more long-term damage than we even realize or will acknowledge. However, we hold on to the conventional pedagogical practices in mathematics but still scratch our heads and wonder why so many of our students stop working.