3 Minute Math Frenzy?

A recent course that I have taken, prompted and encouraged me to ponder the question “I believe that students learn this way, but I am teaching this other way because...” From that, I have felt the new challenge to dig in a bit more deeply as to why things are the way they are with some current educational practices.

With the start of the school year, and the required fact fluency testing, that thinking has brought me to the place of timed math fact fluency testing and my feelings around such practices.  

Resulting from my own experiences as a child, fact fluency is a corner of the math world that I have very deep feelings around. In my own personal opinion, I despise timed fact fluency tests and the use of speed as a motivating factor for students to master math facts. It is my belief and claim that timed math fact fluency assessments have an adverse effect in the lives of many young mathematicians. Even as a teacher, watching students now have to take timed fact fluency tests conjures up such a feeling of negativity and anxiety within me. I can precisely recall the emotions that ran through my 3rd grade body during those times and I just can’t forget those feelings. I truly empathize with kiddos that may be feeling the same way that I once did, mainly because I know how much time and effort it has taken through the years to undo the damage.

My focus throughout my years of teaching has been with increasing fact flexibility for math students. The damage that I know- and now can name- from my own personal experiences only fuels the fire for me to make sure other young mathematicians never feel as inadequate as I once did in my math journey. I truly believe that timed math fluency tests play a huge role in perpetuating this feeling of inadequacy and anxiety for many mathematicians young and old. The damage that also needs consideration is the damage in which the very nature of timed math assessments and fluency tests create a math environment for students which essentially breaks down a sense of community that takes such effort for teachers to build in the first place, often times placing students against one another in the “race” to be among the first to master the facts or finish the test. This is especially true when rewards are to be collected upon completion of mastering facts. Alfie Kohn states in his book, Punished by Rewards, “At best, rewards do nothing to promote this collaboration or a sense of community. More often, they actually interfere with these goals: an undercurrent of “strifes and jealousies” is created whenever people scramble for goodies...”

There are numerous misinterpretations around the word “fluency”. It addresses math anxiety and the emphasis that our nation seems to have with the blind memorization of facts, mostly by holding speed of facts in such a high regard. As educators, we should highlight how number sense, and having math flexibility is the foundation that all math students must have in order to build upon. Yet, the over emphasizing of memorizing math facts is throwing a major wrench into getting to the place where we need to be, all the while creating an anxiety epidemic for mathematics and “losing” many students from believing they are mathematicians in the process.

I feel as though the problem heavily lies with in the way we continually try to motivate students to master these facts. According to Kohn’s words, one of the major five reasons in which rewards fail is due to the fact that rewards decrease or discourage risk-taking behavior. For years, the way that students have been conditioned to master facts is by memorization and with a huge focus on speed. When we are asking students to focus on the time it takes to display this skill and offer rewards when they can complete the task within a time limit, Kohn cautions how, “when are rewarded for what we are doing, we are less likely to be flexible and innovative in the way we solve problems—even very different problems --- that come along later.”  In mathematics, the ultimate goal of leaning and becoming fluent with math facts is so that these can transfer these facts into your areas of math work for efficiency and flexibility with other problems that you encounter. The rewards and the hyper focus on quickness are shifting the focus of what is the true reason for the skill.  Kohn further states, “If you have been promised a reward, you come to see the task as something that stands between you and it.”

In Jo Boaler’s article Fluency Without Fear, she makes such a great analogy when asking the question Why is Mathematics Treated Differently? In the article she prompts us to ponder, “In order to learn to be a good English student, to read and understand novels, or poetry, students need to have memorized the meanings of many words. But no English student would say or think that learning about English is about the fast memorization and fast recall of words.” She goes on to say, “English teachers do not give students hundreds of words to memorize and then test them under timed conditions. All subjects require the memorization of some facts, but mathematics is the only subject in which teachers believe they should be tested under timed conditions.” As a Title teacher of math and literacy, this comparison really struck a chord.  I reflected on the ways that I assess students in reading and instantly thought of the running records that are used regularly to formatively assess young readers. The emphasis of these running records focuses on the process and what the students are using for cueing systems-what they are building on as readers. There is always a fluency notation made about the time it took to do the reading, and notations about the phrasing, intonation or the heeding of punctuation etc. But the words per minute read do not hold a candle to the importance of the solving strategies. I found myself again asking Boaler’s previous question- Why? Why do we treat math so differently?

I strongly believe that it is truly the time we all get on board and follow Boaler’s caution addressed in Fluency Without Fear that reads “When we emphasize memorization and testing in the name of fluency we are harming children, we are risking the future of our ever-quantitative society and we are threatening the discipline of mathematics.” When speed is the motivating factor for which students are receiving rewards, it makes quickness the focus for students. Kohn further solidifies this idea stating, “The truth is even worse than that. Our objective is not really to succeed at the task at all (in the sense of doing it well); it is to succeed at obtaining the reward.”  Timed fluency assessments, the emphasis on speed, and the accompanying reward systems for these tests are damaging to mathematicians and can create a sense of anxiety for math for many which can often have a lasting effects.  

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https://www.youcubed.org/