Spotlight On Composition Teachers
Karen Mitchell
Writer's Memo
When I thought about my topic for this paper, the severe impact of my feelings for math, stemming from my days in primary arithmetic, came to mind. It took a few attempts to capture the emotions of it, and then the suggestions from my classmates helped me to shape the social commentary in the second part. Thanks for taking the time to read it!
The Big Red Book
Math books. Second grade. Big, red ones. Numbers so large they can only fit a few problems on each page. Thin, newsprint pages, off-white with chunks of bark still in them. “Karen,” in black crayon (pre-marker days) written in the upper right hand corner of the red paper cover which, in today’s world, would have been titled Math for Complete and Total Idiots. It’s the biggest book in my desk. All the other stuff, including wadded-up pieces of blue lined paper with dashes in the middle, fit over, under, and around it.
It pulses: I am in the Dodos. The Geniuses get small yellow books with fine, precise numbers that shout “future CPA.” When the Dodos assemble, we must carry our books with us. Many sets of eyes follow me on the ten-mile trek from my seat to the group; my cheeks are as crimson as the cover as I hug the book to my chest, trying to conceal it. I am so traumatized by the time I get there that I can scarcely listen to the lesson--I just imagine having to walk that long path back to my desk at the end of it. Even the simplest numbers confuse me.
At home, I’m not allowed to help my younger brother with his sums. When I volunteer one night at dinner to help him, my father chuckles and asks my older sister.
I burst into tears. “Well, I can add!” I blurt out before running upstairs and burying myself in my pillow.
I once went to a session at the Ethnography Forum at Penn in which a professor from the College of the Ozarks shared a study she had conducted about the values that teachers bring into classrooms. She found that many times teachers emphasize values that reveal painful parts of their childhoods. A teacher who has been physically abused, for example, would emphasize kind, gentle behavior in her classroom. When I began planning and assembling my own classroom, I remembered the big, red book. I planned whole class and group activities. I used the same text for everyone, just differently for different children. I told them about how I struggled; I told them about the big red book. But it didn’t end there.
Throughout my elementary teaching career, I always considered myself an average math teacher, bringing in help when I saw the need. I tried to make math as interesting as possible for children, and I planned activities throughout the day in which I infused numbers and critical thinking in a mathematical way. But I never could generate the kind of excitement about numbers that my friend, colleague, and mentor Gracie could. She talked numbers all day. She had kids staying after school to work challenging math problems. Parents requested that their children be in Gracie’s room because of her exciting math program. I couldn’t fault her, but my literacy program was just as exciting. It’s just that parents see math as an under-taught and immediately useful skill. And then it happened.
About halfway through my teaching career, Gracie and I were chatting in the teacher’s room toward the end of the year about where we’d placed children in the next grade. This task is always arduous, given the number of parent requests in our district.
“Now Karen,” Gracie said, “I’ve put several children in your room next year who are very excited about math. But I told their parents about your strong writing program and that you’d always covered the basics in math.” Gracie, in her inimitable way, felt she had just paid me The Supreme Compliment, I’m sure. It hit me in the gut, right on top of the big red book. My self-image in math plummeted from average to World’s Dumbest Math Teacher. To have talked about me in this way to parents seemed like a huge betrayal. The rest of my career, I struggled to be even the average math teacher I once had been. If Gracie knew the effect of her words, she would be perplexed as to why. But stuff happens between friends, and I forgave Gracie in my mind.
Math has the same effect today on children as it had on me. Take Dixon, for example. Dixon could recite all sorts of number facts off the top of his head. He led the class in “Mad Minutes,” a worksheet designed for timed testing of basic facts. He could add, subtract, multiply, and divide any simple fact you gave him. (Not surprisingly, he was also our best speller.) All the kids in the room thought he was the brightest math student in there. But Dixon was good at one thing: rote learning. He struggled to write even the simplest sentence, and the application of those math facts to any problem solving was beyond him. It’s kind of like the research that suggests that when a paper is perfect grammatically and in spelling, it generally receives higher scores than one that is rich in thought but may have numerous errors.
Mina Shaughnessy was right: public perception of the importance of such knowledge directly contradicts what many teachers believe to be important, and children are no different than adults, because they have received their cues from the adults around them. After one open house for parents in the fall, we found that one parent had gone down the hall with a red pen, marking mistakes on children’s papers which were clearly marked “DRAFT,” and were displayed for the express purpose of showing that there are several traits we work on in writing before the editing stage. We all had several discussions about what to display that year, and we finally decided that for the sake of fragile egos (the children’s and ours) that we would not display uncorrected work in the hall, but inside our classrooms instead, so we had more control over why it was displayed.
One of the ways that we as teachers can begin to overcome public perception of the rote learning myth is to practice the kind of critical thinking activities we so fervently advocate in class. Teachers of all disciplines and levels need to engage in public debate about school issues; we need to write letters and columns in local newspapers. And we need to show our students’ work in a very public manner through such avenues as public fairs, debates, and student anthologies of work (especially in disciplines other than English). We must issue invitations to parents and public officials to attend classes regularly, not just on one special night of the year. We should challenge the notion that the only skills that count are the rote ones, and that, especially in this day of calculators and spell checkers, rote skills can be learned in tandem with more important ones.
By making these assertions, I am not in any manner suggesting that we should stop teaching rote skills, nor that we should only showcase work from the Geniuses. They are not the ones that will be participating in the everyday lives of most of the people in this country. The ones who will be doing that are those of us who struggled in some way or another to get where we are today. And some of them, as children, were taught to be ashamed of their math (or whatever) abilities. Although we have come a long way in building self-esteem in the classroom, it is still not a public enough venue to change the public perception that Shaughnessy so articulately describes. In the present political climate of testing for the most elemental skills, this task becomes even more urgent. It is not more important that I know my math facts than it is that I can help solve complex problems in my community, some of which may call for the application of those facts to help the financial concerns of the less fortunate, or even work out solutions for the economic well-being of the community as a whole.
So now I return to the big red book. It still wreaks havoc in my mind, but I’ve come to a sort of uneasy peace with it. Time has helped me to shape my beliefs about the factors that led me to hate math so much, and to be ashamed of my abilities. Even through the writing of this paper, I have laid the demon to rest a bit more. Its only implication is for me, and for all teachers in their own ways, to continue to help children work through their own weaknesses in positive easy, and to help break down barriers in the minds of the public by advocating for themselves and for children in this regard. The big red book turned out to be instructive: it, in the end, assisted me to form warm and lasting bonds with the children I taught, and to be a better teacher because of it.