Confidence In Math

Today I want to write about a certain student that we are all very familiar with. As future math teachers, we all know of the student who is convinced that they do not have the “math gene”. By this I mean, the student that thinks that they are incapable of learning and doing math. As a tutor, have been working with a student who literally believes that he will not pass his math class because he was not capable of learning the material. For his privacy, in this post I am going to call him John. I tutored John in college algebra last semester, and now I have him again this semester. Last semester, John barely showed up to his tutoring sessions, and when I asked him why he wasn’t showing up he told me that it was because he thought it was pointless and that he wasn’t going to learn it anyways so there was no point getting extra help. Personally, I think that the reason he was doing so poorly was because he wasn’t letting himself learn. John had one last session last semester right before the final. He met with me after missing several of his sessions. I was trying to teach him something that his calculator can do that will help him on the final. He then admitted to me that he did not have a calculator and hasn’t had one all semester. I realized, from the second he started the class he truly believed that he wasn’t going to pass the class. So of course, he didn’t. He did not want to learn. So, he decided he was incapable, because to him it was easier to believe that it wasn’t in his control than to put in the work to learn it.

This semester John is a completely new student. The first day of tutoring he walked in (with a calculator!) and he said, “I should have come to more of these last semester”. Since then he has come to all but one session. He comes and works for the entire time, and he actually questions from lecture. He said he has attended almost every class and he filled out every note guide! The best part about all of this is that he really believes that he can succeed this time. He comes to tutoring and is INSANELY more confident.

Something similar to this happened to me while I was in middle and high school. When I was younger, about fifth grade, I did not do any of the testing that the “smart” students did to be in the smart math courses. I didn’t care or let it bother me until I was in 7^th grade into my high school years. By then I realized that I wasn’t being challenged in math. So, in hopes of joining a math class that was more challenging to me my mom called and asked the school if I could move up, because they weren’t allowing 8^th graders to skip classes. Therefore, when I was in high school, I did not really feel like I was treated as if I was smart in high school. Even though I got A’s in all my math classes, my class was always getting compared to the accelerated students, thus we were always treated as if we weren’t as capable at math.

The reason I wanted to write about this is because this something I really want to focus on when I am a teacher. I want to make sure I treat every student as if they are capable of learning math. I believe that a student is capable of doing math as long as they believe that they are capable of learning math. I think that it is extremely important for all of us to remember as teachers.