Don’t Tell Kids You’re Bad at Math

Even if you think it’s true!

Well, July is getting to be a distant memory, and the countdown until school starts is heading towards single digits. Speaking of digits, let’s talk a little bit about math. I hope that seeing the word math so many times hasn’t made you click away from this post, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has.

If you’re still with me, please keep reading, even if fractions give you hives or you consider yourself a ‘generous tipper’ so that you don’t have to do any calculations when it’s time to pay the bill.

I’m going to tell you something on behalf of every teacher that will ever work with your children. Never tell your kids you’re bad at math — even if you believe it’s true.

Here’s why: when kids hear you say that you’re bad at math, they believe you. And worse, they often conclude that they also will inevitably be bad at math. Sure, some traits are genetically passed from biological parents to offspring — height, eye color, my grandmother’s knobby ankles. Math is not one of these traits.

Math skills develop over time as a result of steady, hard work, good instruction, practice and most of all, confidence. I teach high school science, and often, as I’m teaching, I’ll throw in a little mental math challenge. For example, I might say, “So if the temperature was 45 degrees yesterday and today, it’s 51 degrees, then it’s warmed up by…”

I’ll pause, waiting for a chorus of correct answers. In my earlier years of teaching, I was surprised to hear silence — even from bright students with good grades. But with time, I’ve learned that for many students, saying a number out loud is as or more terrifying than telling your parents you crashed the car or asking someone to prom.

This lack of number confidence probably has infinite sources. Some students may have been teased for giving wrong answers in class. Due to large class sizes, some students have probably been able to blend in with their surroundings and may not have ever volunteered an answer. Other students may need to see the problem in writing, or are too embarrassed to count it out on their fingers, which is what they would need to do to figure out the correct answer.

For sure, though, some students have grown up hearing adults in their lives claiming to be bad at math, and as a result, these students have also internalized this attitude. It’s like those PSAs from the 1980’s where the parents find their son using drugs, and his reply is, “I learned it from watching you!”

I’m lucky to teach at a school where we meet regularly with students and their families and I am surprised how often this topic comes up. When a student says that they are struggling with fractions or can’t figure out circles, the parents will often laugh it off.

“Well, I can’t count nine eggs to make a dozen, and your father can’t even count as high as the channels on the TV,” they’ll laugh.

This is a hokey anecdote, but what was surprising was how easy it was for me to think of silly but relatable ways that people laugh about being bad at math. Take a minute and I bet you can think of a few examples of your own.

Culturally, it’s almost seems a little bit cool to be bad at math. Pay attention over the next few months, and I promise, you will hear a reasonable, intelligent person practically brag that they’re not good with numbers. It’s interesting, because it’s definitely not cool to struggle with other subjects. Even though I have lots of students that struggle with reading, I have never heard a parent joke, “Well, no surprise there — I can barely make it through the alphabet!”

I’m not saying that you should parade around declaring you love of square numbers or memorizing digits of pi. But there’s lots of research (like Dr. Carol Dweck’s) showing that students’ frame of mind when they are learning has a huge impact on how well they learn. If a student believes they are bad at math, then learning math will be a struggle and a chore that they will avoid at all costs. If a student really believes that they can get better at something with hard work, they they are more likely to try, especially when they have the support of helpful people like parents and teachers.

There are lots of ways that you can help your kids do better in school. Unfortunately, a lot of them take a lot of time or cost a lot of money. Just the other day, I had a college student come to my door selling ‘Supplemental Curriculum’ for me to use to help my own kids avoid academic backsliding. $99 for a bunch of crappy DVDs(!) and also putting in my own time to figure out how to use them? No thank you.

Here’s the great thing. Not saying you are bad at math costs $0, and aside from a little work to break the habit, also takes no effort. If your child is struggling and you feel like you need to say something to ease their frustration, try saying something more along the lines of:

• “I’ve always had to work really hard at math too!”
• “I never really understood adding fractions either. Let’s figure out how to do it together”
• “How did you get to be so good at drawing (legos, piano…)? Maybe we can approach math the same way you approached learning how to do that?”
• “No, I can’t tell you when and how you will use this in real life, but you’re probably going to have a more exciting and cooler life than me, so you’d better learn it!”

Now that I’m typing them, these statements sound pretty corny too, and I have no proof that they’ll work. But I do know that there’s 180 school days ahead, and I think we should all be willing to try as hard as we can to make them great for all kids in every subject.

So let’s commit! No slandering subtraction, no dissing division. No maligning multiplication, teasing trigonometry, cursing calculus or faulting fractions.

Let’s have a great math year!