Attitudes About Math

Since the first few days of class are all about getting to know the students and establishing classroom atmosphere, I decided to make concept maps to find out about student attitudes about Math. I intended to only do this activity in my support classes, but I have support period 1 and when I saw the results I decided to have all students do this. In support class I asked students to pair with a “like minded student”. But when I looked at the results, they are all like minded, so that was a surprise for me. I expected the negative feelings, but was unprepared for how negative they were.

This student ran the gamut from HATE, to DON’T LIKE, so I guess there is some room for improvement.

What I like about the purple one on the upper left is that it did include Learning

How is it that as teachers we have never shown the fun, exploration side of Math?

I made this one large because I had this student last year in my core class and this now explains some of the behavior I saw. He is actually a very bright kid, extremely bright in fact but he leaves the tests/quizzes blank and doesn’t even attempt classwork. I felt like a failure with him, but now he tells me that he considers my subject EVIL. Ok, I’m not going to take that personally, but this tells me a lot about what I need to do to reach this student.

This student seems to see Math as just a few basic operations–and finds them stressful and hates it.

I love this “it takes forever to answer a question”.

This student is also one I had last year, and the level of insight and thinking really impressed me. This one was difficult to photo because there was so much detail, so I took several close photos.

Guilt, I say “This is easy” and I guess I need to stop saying that. I also try to make it fun, but I didn’t realize I was making the process worse….I think it probably is fun from my very old, adult view, but I forgot to look at things through my teenage eyes…..

One of the students said he hates it when the teacher doesn’t help. I think I help, but this week I am going to ask the support class to do some quick writes as their warm up and one of them is what does “help” mean in the classroom. How does a good teacher help and How does a bad teacher help. As a result of all of these, I did a lot of thinking about how this year needs to be structured and made several goals based on their thoughts.

1. Make the class more interactive and less “boring”.

2. Make better use of class time and assign no (or little) homework.

3. Infuse the class with more fun–games, activities, music, use more instructional videos, use the computer lab, more hands on.

4. Be more helpful–more about help when the students have written their definitions.

5. Laugh more and stop stressing out–I may be stressing the students out.

6. Change their minds!

I want students to see the beauty and mystery of mathematics, not the boring, dull and formula side. Maybe I need to emphasize less on formulas and more about the uses. One student said there was too many notes–so I need to structure the note taking differently.