Fear of Failure

Students generally have a serious fear of failure, which is exacerbated in the mathematics classroom.

I dedicated my undergraduate research for my education degree to the alleviation of mathematics anxiety. So out of that I have a series of teaching tactics that I employ to generate more buy-in to my classes.

The results of my tactics has been a higher return on homework (75%+), and better quiz and test scores.

Tactic 1: Grading for attempt, not for accuracy

One of the biggest issues with mathematics anxiety is the classic aversion therapy given by grading for error. Students will try their best, and try all the questions, and pour all of their emotional and intellectual energy into a math worksheet, only to have it returned with red X’s and near zero grades.

Why do we do this? The first argument is for comments – students need to read teacher comments where we point out what is wrong and correct it. This is not a compelling argument, because not only does it create a huge amount of work for the teacher, students likely will not read the notes if they feel bad about the grade received.

My solution: I check off that they have attempted the work (100%, 50%, or 0%), and then proceed to recite the answers, and then take requests for specific problems. This way, students are in control of checking their own work, and they take notes on the problems which they got wrong.

Tactic 2: Flexibility with deadlines

This may sound counter-intuitive to many teachers, because we want to cut down on the work that we have to do, and receiving work randomly is such a hassle. In order to cut down on this, I use my grading-for-attempt method combined with a strict deadline that any homework for a specific chapter must be shown to me before that chapter test. Afterwards, it’s a hard 0.

What this allows is for students to be able to pick back up if they slipped for whatever reason. Teaching in Detroit means that my students have a whole host of home responsibilities that may get in the way of their school work. As the teaching program at Wayne State emphasized, I would not be a good low-income teacher if I were to expect my students would have the same free time that perhaps an upper middle-class student might have.

Whatever their reasons are for turning in late work, I do not demand explanations (although they often tell me) because it doesn’t matter. I will accept any work that students do. I do not worry about copying because to me, even if they wrote it down by looking at work already completed, isn’t that just like taking notes? And do not notes help students learn?

Tactic #3: Verbalizing methods

There is a good middle ground between babying students and holding them to high expectations. I have heard of teachers who spend their entire first two months trying to re-do earlier math lessons, and then are frustrated that their students don’t seem to “get it”. When students are constantly retaught the same mathematics, they either get bored, or they are trained to believe that they do not need to memorize mathematics because it will just be retaught to them again later on. It’s a pretty easy pitfall to go into, and I understand why – sometimes students just don’t seem to have those basic math skills.

I counter this pitfall by expecting students to have those skills already under their belt. If they don’t, they will work with other students to get down the algorithms, and save me the work. I don’t lose the students who are solid in earlier math, and I can differentiate between student levels easily.

However, at the same time, when I go over problems, I verbalize all of the methods that are used, in order to keep students from “getting lost”. I don’t have to poll the class to see who’s “lost” or not, because it can be any student at any point in time. So I’ll verbalize the steps, redefine words, and verbalize the reasons for each step.

For Geometry and above, I skip “showing my work” for each step and just write the steps down. This makes the students engage more to follow the math and emphasizes to them that they do know how to do basic algebra by themselves.

Tactic #4: Dictionaries

At the beginning of each chapter, I have my students write down all the vocabulary that they will be using in the chapter, their definitions, and an example.

Technical vocabulary is not emphasized to teachers in professional development, so vocabulary continues to be spaced out in between concepts in their notes and not emphasized as the basis for engaging in a topic.

At the front of their binder each chapter dictionary will be found in reverse order. This maintains a clean reference section where students can easily go back and look up a word that is written in their own way. This is less intimidating than the clinical vocabulary offered in their textbook.

So any time a student has a question, I ask them to first look up the vocabulary in their dictionary and see if they can figure it out. If not, then I guide them through their question.

So this is an in-exhaustive list of some tactics I use to alleviate math anxiety. I do other things, like read a guided meditation concerning catastrophizing and procrastination. I’ll comment more on that later.