Math

 Math. One of the scariest words to me.  It's really a shame that one bad experience can impact my life decades later.  It's a shame what some teachers can do to students and the lasting impact it can leave.

This is my story: Sophomore year of high school. Geometry. I got a 46% on my first test. ( I was a A/B student). When my teacher handed the test back to me, he said, "I didn't expect you to do well. You're a girl and girls can't do math. " in front of the whole class. Real motivating, right?? I wanted out of his class. My parents decided that he should come out to our house a couple of nights a week (after football practice, of course) and tutor me, with my mom present, so she could help me on the nights he wasn't tutoring me. (My dad was doing field work. My mom was also a teacher.) I don't remember how far into this new regiment we were, but it wasn't very far, when he said to my mom. "I thought you were smarter than this." Seriously?!?!  I got to switch our of geometry. I took Home Ec. instead. One day, I was standing be the door of the Home Ec. room, across from the Geometry room and the teacher saw me standing there. Do you know what he had the audacity to say to me??  "So, you'd rather be barefoot and pregnant for the rest of your life?" If I had known then, what I know now, I would have made sure he lost his job!

Years later, I'm in a professional development workshop on Cognitively Guided Instruction in Math at a former district. The instructor, who is now a dear friend of mine, gave a problem. All of the stress and anxiety came rushing back. I got tears in my eyes as I remembered what that high school teacher had said to me. The instructor came over and explained it, step by step.

This summer, when I was looking for a new job, one of the online applications had a cognitive assessment piece. I'd never seen one of those before in a job app. When I got to that section of the application, it was all math problems and TIMED! Ugh!! I froze again! I just clicked on random answers. I couldn't even think through how to solve the problems.

All this to say that, as educators, we have the ability to encourage our students or to give them a lifetime of stress and anxiety. When you are teaching, please be aware of the words that you use and how those can either make, or break, a students for years to come. Are you going to be a encourager or a discourager?