Math Resilience

Authored by Hannah LeBlanc

A big topic in the lower school is our new math curriculum. At a previous school, I taught kindergarten using Developing Roots, which is the Early Childhood curriculum associated with Think!Math, so I was pumped to adopt this new curriculum. One of the things that I really enjoyed about the Think! Math program was the way it fostered resiliency and grit in math. This is something I have struggled with throughout my years of teaching. Kids are quick to say, “I don’t know how to do this,” then sit back and wait for someone else to solve a problem. And, oh hey, that was me in school, too. I’ll just nonchalantly hang back and pretend I’m doing some work, but in reality, I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m not brave enough to try. Sidenote, I also did this in Elementary School Orchestra. My parents were so proud of me… the violinist who never actually touched the bow to the strings because I wasn’t quite sure how to do it. Fake it til you make it… although, my orchestra career didn’t “make it” and I quit in 3rd grade. 

I talked a big game about this program and how great it is for students. But as we started to get into it… it humbled me. We had a few bumps along the way. First of all, our teacher manuals don’t exist yet. We’re hoping they will arrive by January? Piecing things together from the online resources can be very time-consuming. And the most humbling moment occurred when trying to understand an activity in the “Getting Started” unit. I tried to make sense of it on my own with no luck. I pleaded with Shea to ask the trainer, and she gave me some feedback from the trainer that still made no sense to me. Exasperated and frustrated, I pulled Tiffany Busby and Lisa Boone into a room and tried to role play the whole activity to make sense of it. In the end, the frustration sort of melted into delusion and laughter, because we never did quite figure out how it taught kids to be resilient when it seemed like there was actually no way for them to be successful. But without the manual, we didn’t know if that was the case. At a certain point, we decided that we tried all the ways we could and maybe we needed to come up with a new activity. And maybe that was a secret challenge… what if the publishers PLANNED for us to get a taste of our own medicine — trying new things and making sense of a challenging task can be frustrating.. But it doesn’t mean we’re bad teachers. We worked together in the end to tweak the activity to make it work and also just came up with another activity. For those wanting to try it out, please see the “Crazy Colors” activity below. We never did figure out how a student could strategize to perfectly match their partner’s color tile set up if the original pattern maker didn’t tell the colors in order. 

We have lots of very talented, quick students at St. Andrew’s, so one of the areas that is hardest for these kids is when they are challenged in a way when they aren’t quite sure how to get started. Having to sit with that discomfort, then find a starting point and try something you know how to do and see if it works… Well, that’s really hard. But I’m finding that with our math curriculum, students are rising to the occasion. In our classroom, we are learning this mantra: 

It is okay to not know the answer right away. It is okay to not even know where to start! But it’s not okay not to try. 

Here is an example of an awesome second grade Mind Workout activity. Some students said, “oh this is easy,” and quickly decided they figured it out. Others felt unsure of where to start, but began to make sense of it once they were willing to get their feet wet and give it a shot. And on top fo that, others thought they had it figured out, then realized along the way that they had to go BACK and try some things again. BIG LEARNING was happening!! 

Because there is a lot more going on in the Lower School than just 2nd Grade, I reached out to April Cosgrave, the 4th Grade Math teacher, to get her perspective on the new unit. It sounds like across the Lower School, building resilience in Math is a needed goal, but also a helpful pathway to building resilience and grit in learning and life overall. 

“Fourth graders seem to be loving Think! math. I personally loved the intentionality of the curriculum during the first 10 days of setting the classroom culture around trying new things and keeping a growth mindset. Fourth graders in general, don’t have a very good relationship with trying and being unsuccessful. They seem to become defeated if the first thing they try doesn’t work. This doesn’t seem to only happen in math, this is across the board (recess, playing games with friends, navigating technology, etc). Through the year I can see their relationship with problem solving and perseverance grow tremendously. They start to wrestle with hard problems and think of it like a puzzle versus an impossible numbers task. I also think they learn that making mistakes is normal and we are all human, through my wonderful modeling (lol). But truthfully, I like to draw attention to myself when I make a mistake so they learn that it is completely normal and the world isn’t going to end because of a simple error. I think one of the most important things to instill in kids to help with their perseverance in math, is that mistakes are where learning happens. When we make mistakes it forces us to slow down and look closely at what we have done, and this usually gives us some pretty great insight. I love watching students step back from their white boards and check over their hard work, especially when they’ve been asked to take a second look due to an error. It is as if I can see the lightbulb come on when they figure out what they’re missing or where they went wrong. They beam with pride when they figure out that they were on the right track, but made a simple mistake. We have so much fun in 4th grade math, and I spend a lot of time (probably too much) creating a space where we can ALL make mistakes and we help each other figure it out or shake it off.”