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Walking into her sophomore year math class, Taylor Paris was nervous. She’d had a rocky relationship with the subject ever since long division showed up in elementary school. “I knew I didn’t understand math concepts very well. I knew that it was something that took me a longer time (than classmates),” she recalled.
So she was pleasantly surprised when one of the first assignments from teacher Sarah Strong required no calculating. Instead, Strong asked the class to write a letter to math – as if it were a person. These “Dear Math” letters are a tool that Strong developed as a way to understand students’ relationship to math when they arrive in her classroom, which researchers call mathematical identity. What Strong learns from these letters informs how she teaches individual students and whole classes throughout the year. Often that means working to disrupt the negative beliefs that students hold about their math abilities, which tend to revolve aroun..
- Sunday, September 8, 2024