…is the closest phrase I can come up with that could be the antithesis of learned helplessness.
This year, I’m teaching students who struggle more with math than any other students I’ve encountered. About 1/3 of my tenth grade chemistry students are still struggling with algebra 1. Not surprisingly, they’ve been shutting down when I ask them to do anything that involves math.
Earlier this year, I did a math intervention for one of these students, who is quite intelligent but has the biggest mental block against math that I’ve ever seen. She couldn’t wrap her brain around what algebra was supposed to be doing. I wrote down an equation using Post-It notes for each piece—the equation 3x + 5 = 11 became:
3 x + 5 = 11
(Each underlined item was on a separate Post-It.) As we manipulated the numbers in the equation, I moved the Post-Its around, and she suddenly saw what we were doing—algebra is just a fancy word for moving the Post-Its around.
I recalled this trick this week as I taught the ideal gas law. It’s probably one of the only things most people remember from chemistry: PV = nRT
I started by teaching them to assign variables based on the units, based on a list of quantities, units, and the variable we use for each. The next task was finding the quantities in a word problem that had units, and writing the variable on top of the number in the word problem.
The third task (day #2) was to make a list of the variables and substitute them into the equation. For this, I used the Post-It trick (though I needed something larger, so I used pieces of paper and taped them to the white board). I wrote each variable on a paper and taped it up. Then, I went through the list of variable assignments, and for each one, wrote what number it equalled on another piece of paper and taped it over the first, until we had an equation with only one variable left. Then, as we simplified the expression, I moved the papers around to show what was happening.
After we solved the problem, I went back to the original equation and showed how I could move the letters around the same way I moved the numbers. At least half a dozen light bulbs came on in kids who had never really grasped algebra up to that point. Then, I gave them a heavily scaffolded worksheet to reinforce the topic.
Today, I had a tutoring session with some of the kids. About half of my students had actually understood the homework without any additional help (which is in itself unusual), and that half took it upon themselves to teach the other half, without my prompting or getting involved. I actually left the classroom to find the head of school, to make sure she had a chance to catch the kids in the act of taking their learning into their own hands and making sure their friends didn’t miss out on it.
In class today (just after the tutoring session), most of the kids completely understood the homework and the “do now” problem, and were feeling confident in ways that were clearly unusual for many of them. With luck, I’ll be able to leverage this confidence over the rest of the year, and a little more self-confidence should help with a host of issues, including proactiveness, effort, and some behavior problems.
