My story is slightly different from that anti-lightbulb moment where you’re motivated and into it until the teacher says something or does something that makes you turn off. I think we can all recognize that feeling, and I think my difficulty in coming up with an idea for this is that I’ve had it happen too often. Disappointment is the norm rather than the exception for me and formal education. Of course, as a person who suffers from depression, finding motivation to do anything is pretty hard to begin with, so that’s also part of it.
There was no “girls are bad at math” moment where a teacher said something and I got turned off math.
As a grade 4 student we were learning multiplication tables. One of the methods used was to get all the students lined up with the teacher facing the front of the line. The first two students in the line would face off against each other to see who could respond first to a multiplication problem given by the teacher. The person who responded slower had to stay at the front of the line and go up against the next person as a sort of public shaming (or at least that’s what it felt like). I now know that I perform terribly under that kind of pressure and avoid situations like that. The other teaching method used in that class was finishing a set number of problems in a set amount of time. I was so slow I was eventually sent out of the class every time they did this “math minute” to do them on my own. Because I was labelled “bad at math” I internalized that and learned to expect failure. My parents felt like I wasn’t trying hard enough because just doing math problems as homework made me anxious.
I am probably not inherently better or worse at math than your average person, but my teacher’s pedagogical choices made me suffer unnecessarily and every grade after that I slipped further and further behind because of how my anxiety affected my learning in that one class. I think a lot of people develop anxiety around math that is unrelated to their actual skill at doing math.
What could have been done after I started to show difficulty? The most significant would have been to try changing teaching tactics. Are there other methods of teaching multiplication that don’t require memorization and response under stress? I don’t recall if my elementary school had a guidance counsellor of any kind, but it would have been helpful for someone to actually ask me why I was doing poorly. I’m not sure I could have articulated my anxieties clearly, but surely a child crying every day over doing basic math is not normal.
The larger lesson is to take the anxieties and stresses of kids seriously. A lot of people will agree with the idea that doing well in tests is a separate skill from whatever is being tested, but still disapprove of using other methods of evaluation or providing accommodations to students with mental health disabilities. One person telling me that it wasn’t my fault for trying and failing in Grade 4 math would have literally changed my life.