David Lee Finkle, an amazing artist who creates and publishes the comic strip Mr. Fitz, ran this strip yesterday. I hope he doesn’t mind me borrowing the image. You can find it and the rest of his work on his website here.

As a retired math teacher, this one has had me thinking across yesterday and today. Most students, almost all of them, have been conditioned to think of mathematics as finding the right answer to put down on the paper. Standardized testing has only reinforced this approach to the discipline. It doesn’t matter how one gets to the answer as long as one bubbles in the correct letter on the test: A, B, C, or D.

Challenged by those items where the student has to enter some other response, most choose the simple strategy of ignoring the item and moving to the next question.

And why not? The typical state test is so bad that 30% is usually a passing score, give or take a few percentage points.

Cheat sites have only made the problem worse. Demand that students show their work and they will access a website that will give them all the steps to copy onto their paper. Online practice programs make it even more worse. There’s no need to copy the steps unless the teacher is a masochist and the program requires the student to enter them, which means hours of grading work for the teacher with little instructional value for the students who rarely review the feedback.

I tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to change the student mindset and the classroom environment. They were not students learning math, a subject most find uninteresting, but young mathematicians learning their craft who had to find solutions to problems and defend them. Prove to their classmates and others around the world that they had the right answer. That meant more than an oral explanation in the classroom; it meant producing a written product that could be posted online for students in other parts of the world and cultures to review and understand.

It’s a hard thing to pull off. But it’s a skill all students need as they move along their life journey and enter the adult world, even those who will enter the trades. Every plumber needs to explain the problem to the homeowner and what he needs to do to repair it. Every mechanic needs to explain to the car owner what’s making that funny noise and what they need to do. They have to be able to answer questions and defend their solutions.

Math! Not as worthless as many people think.

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PS: I haven’t been posting much as I travel through my first year of retirement. Education issues are well covered by others more knowledgeable than me and I don’t need to kick my two cents into the conversation. I’ve come to believe that most educational blogging is trapped in an echo chamber and it’s hard to reach the outside audience as well as the fact that even if my side wins the arguments, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. If we want to save public education, we have to roll our sleeves up and enter the messy business of politics. No promises, I am working on reimagining what I want to do with this forum. More to come.