Each year, as students sink farther and farther into the abyss of test-driven curriculum and low-level thinking, I have to work harder and harder to teach them high-level thinking skills. This year, my students and I seem to be approaching a tipping point.
In past years, when my students were underprepared for a test, they would take the test, fail, come back after school for extra help, and would re-take the test with a much better understanding of the concepts, and earning a much better grade. However, this year I have several students who do their best to avoid taking the test in the first place. They manage to be absent on the day of the test, and they repeatedly avoid coming back after school to make it up. Last quarter, one student admitted to me that she had no intention of ever taking the test, and that she was fine with receiving a grade of zero for it. Three others finally came in on the last day that they were able to make it up.
All of these students had something in common: their basic math skills were unusually weak. They were so embarrassed that they tried to avoid ever taking the tests so I wouldn’t see how much they were struggling with simple algebra. (For the record, the problem is not the school district—two of the students went to public Lynn middle schools, but one attended a private school, and one came from another country.)
I believe that one of the causes is that it has become not OK for students to fail. By “fail,” I don’t necessarily mean earn a failing grade at the end of a quarter or fail an entire course. Rather, students do not have opportunities to struggle with something, failing their way to success (i.e., continuing to try different strategies until one of them works). More often, they get one chance to succeed, and then the teacher moves on to the next topic (which often builds on the previous one). If they fail, they are often shamed and shoved into an endless cycle in which the same explanation is repeated over and over, with the same result. These students become adept at hiding their failures; the students in question managed to pass algebra 2 without being able to reliably substitute variables into an equation or solve an equation in fractional form for a variable in the denominator.
The only way I am able to uncover these problems is when I am able to watch students work. One obvious way to do this is when the students are making up a test after school with few other students in the room. Another strategy is that I make some test questions a little too hard for students to do without help, and I circulate around the room helping them. If they have questions about the physics, I respond Socratically, asking them questions until they figure out the concepts for themselves. As soon as it’s clear that they understand the physics, I help them through the math, stopping and redirecting them each time they falter. Some students experience a significant improvement in their understanding of algebra through this process. Others never get there, remaining in an awkward limbo in which they have a 12th grade understanding of the physics, but only a 7th grade understanding of the math.
In the long-term, this approach is not sustainable. As students’ math and critical thinking skills continue to get weaker, students need more and more help and take longer and longer to answer the questions on tests. Students are trying fewer and fewer of the homework problems, giving up the instant their understanding begins to falter. Fewer and fewer students are signing up for physics because the problem-solving and the math are too daunting. If all of us in education could just teach them to fail in a way that they can learn from, there might be some hope of reversing the trend and giving them a much more successful future.
