It's all so confusing

Still, sometimes it makes sense.

There’s a mistake that approximately five thousand 3rd Graders made in class today. If you know kids this age, you’ve seen it before. It looks like this:

“How much money is needed to make $10?” The answer is $10.

Now, this isn’t my first rodeo. It’s my tenth, I’ve been doing this since 2013. And I know where this mistake is coming from, I know to anticipate it, and I know to bring it up explicitly, I have thoughts on how to address it.

One student, call her Violet, showed me her page and asked me if it was correct. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I paused and gathered my thoughts. She had said that $9.20 and $1.80 make $10.00.

I tried to lightly prompt Violet with “what’s $9 + $1.80?” but that didn’t get anywhere. Then I remembered an old trick. I took out my pen and wrote $5.25 + $5.75 on the side of her page. “Some people might say this is equal to $10. But it’s not, is it? Is it too high or too low?” She thought and agreed that it was too high. “By how much?” I asked. She answered, by a dollar, and she explained why. I said, OK, I think that what you wrote here is also more than $10, but can you revise it? And she did.

This is from Primary Math Singapore by the way.

I got on a bit of a roll as I helped the next kid. She had the same mistake. I gave her a kind of sentence starter: “We want to say that 65 + 45 is 100, but it’s actually…” and I trailed off, and let her complete the sentence. Which, after a reminder, she could do. And then she repeated that sentence several times as she revised her work. “I want to say 85 + 25 is 100, but actually…”

The lesson I take from this is that kids don’t collapse when told they are wrong. But there is a way to correct a child. And the way to do it is to ferry them along towards enlightenment. What I mean is, my feedback did not dwell on the fact of their wrongness. I didn’t really even explain why it was wrong. It might be fair to say that I distracted them, but if so I distracted them with learning. And then, when the distraction was through, they returned to their work and saw the mistake with their own, new eyes.

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I was recently in Israel and spoke at a conference. The talk revolved around how teachers relate to research. The slides are here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Luke Handtalker in action.

One of the things I said in that talk was that teachers like theory. By that I mean that some of the most popular research ideas in education — growth mindset, multiple intelligences, learning styles —are not exactly practical. They don’t suggest activities or ways of organizing your classroom. They are theoretical ideas. Their function is to give us ways to make sense of teaching life, which at times can be chaotic and confusing.

I think this is true for others, but it is certainly true for me. I don’t read research or write about teaching to improve my teaching. My main motivation is to understand. I, personally, find my daily life baffling. Things happen, and I don’t know why. Why did a student cry during that class? Why did that activity work? What went wrong?

The truth is that there will always be a certain degree of unknowability in teaching. There are too many humans involved for it to be any other way. And yet that just makes the need for understanding that much stronger.

And, sure, it’s reasonable to suppose that if you understand teaching more deeply, if there are true patterns and principles that give order to the work of teaching then that will eventually help us engineer better classrooms. Sure. But that, to me, is just the cherry on top.

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Education is a deeply unserious place, and I try not to let it drive me crazy. But it’s a rough time to be a writer about teaching. More precisely it’s a lonely time. People seem even more obsessed with superficial stuff than usual in education. The slogans, the mottos, the total disinterest in classroom teaching, the vapid conferences, the effort to reconceive professional development as self-care, the profit-seekers, writers who become insta-experts on homework or grades or whatever the topic of controversy is for a week, it’s all too much.

It makes me want to ask, what are we doing here?

And I think that my answer is that we’re — you and I, I mean — are trying to understand teaching. We are asking, why is it that sometimes kids feel bad when you correct them and other times their eyes get big and they grow excited? Can you engineer the good kind of response? Or do you have to avoid, as much as possible, talk of whether kids made a mistake?

And how do kids actually come to memorize math facts? And why does homework seem so important to parents of young children, far beyond its actual usefulness? Why do some activities leave children overwhelmed? Is growth mindset real? When is research helpful, and when is it not?

And is this just about teaching? Are the limits of research in education the limits of research in society? What else do we memorize without practice, and what do we need to drill? And what is drill? What happens during it?

It’s all so confusing!

To the extent that there’s a mission statement here, it’s not that we’re swapping activities or pedagogical insights. It’s just trying to piece together, as much as possible, how all this stuff works. Because it’s confusing, and because it’s interesting, and just because it’s life, and making sense of life is part of living.