How do you eat an elephant?

The question of “math and the brain” could fill entire libraries, but in this post, I’ll narrow the focus to a more practical level: what it’s like for a student’s brain to face math.

The book The Now Habit, by Neil Fiore, discusses how people become overwhelmed just by thinking about the task at hand. Fiore talks about the fact that people imagine the end goal, along with every single step they will have to take on the way. For large projects, this is indeed going to overwhelm people, completely unnecessarily!

His advice is to re-frame thoughts about projects:

Stop fixating on the outcome. Just figure out the very first step.

Mathematics is a long con. There is no end result, there is no conclusion of the book, and discoveries are often accidental and unrelated to the original intention! This is where students fall off the bandwagon.

The subject is already a huge kick-start to abstract thinking, and it’s largely the only subject actively raising those boundaries. So, students are already out of their comfort zone, just by virtue of being in math class.

The issue is one of procrastination: trying to avoid the discomfort. Math asks us to push our minds to think differently, to generalize abstractly and ultimately manipulate intangible concepts.

My solution in the classroom is to constantly talk about “the first step”. Every problem has a “first step” that students will either call-back or answer outright. For my Geometry class, the “first step” is generally always “draw the diagram”, or if they have a diagram given, then it becomes “fill out the diagram”.

Another issue comes from the fact that this is uncomfortable, and answers are not instantaneous. Students are trained from an early age to see the answer right away. In math, there becomes much less of seeing an answer right away, and more about pattern-finding and manipulating.

So in my class, I ask students to stare at the problem. I give them nearly a whole minute, or sometimes more (it feels like an hour – us teachers have a really hard time standing in silence!). If students look at me, I remind them that my face does not contain any information and they need to look at the board. It is one of the most difficult exercises because students can be very unsure of themselves.

But! When I call on the one or two brave students to give their opinion, they are generally correct – and the gasps of amazement come from students who found the pattern but were unsure is brilliant. They are so proud of themselves for having found the pattern!

At the same time, they are learning that math takes patience. It takes a mind devoid of other thoughts, only focused on the problems and any related information, to work out a higher-level math problem.

So how do you eat an elephant?

Piece by piece!