When I began my teaching career over twenty years ago, I gave my high school English students a book biography assignment. I asked them to tell me about their reading lives and books that made an impact on them. I thought this was a great assignment, one I loved doing myself as a way to introduce them to me. However, not all of my students were thrilled. I had reluctant readers, students struggling to find representations of themselves in books, and emerging multi-lingual students whose access to written language was limited. Ultimately, this assignment was about teaching me more about my students. It gave me an idea of what to look for in the books I brought to my classroom and how I considered the literature choices available.
When researching interventions for math anxiety later in my career, I revisited the idea of writing a biography. At the beginning of professional learning experiences with teachers, I would often ask them to jot down their feelings about teaching a particular content area, like fractions. The responses from teachers helped guide the choices I made in the sessions. If their math experiences had been traumatic, I began to explore why and how I could adapt my instruction to help them move past their fears. In the years since, the idea of writing a “mathography” has caught on. A Mathography is defined as a personal narrative focused on the role of math or a person’s math experiences.
I still love to have educators in my professional learning experiences write a mathography. However, time doesn’t always allow for the time to write or tell me a longer narrative. When working with students, I have found that sometimes the thing that they hate more than math class is writing in math class. However, an understanding of what students’ math experiences have been like is really critical to addressing math anxiety.
To combat the “writing” part, I have created some options that allow students to sketch it out as a cartoon, or highlight in words and pictures their experiences. Students could also create their own graphics with a site like Canva. The idea is that when we ask about math experiences, we must then truly listen and respond. This is not an “admire the problem” type assignment. We are gathering information to inform how we respond to students’ experiences.
What are some other ways you get to know your students’ math experiences?