Judy Willis - Learning to Love Math: Teaching Strategies That Change Student Attitudes and Get Results

by Judy Willis, M.D.

2010 by ASCD

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Dedicated to the BRAIN, because you are not stubborn or stuck in your ways. Your generous plasticity lets your owners determine their own intelligence.

Much appreciation goes to my editor, Jamie Greene, without whose suggestions both the structure and readability of this book would have been much less coherent. To Scott Willis and the team in book acquisitions: no matter what I needed, even though it may have had nothing to do with book acquisitions, Scott never said, "That's not my department." His positive attitude must keep his amygdala wide open and dopamine up enough to give transfusions.

Tim Ito is the Internet technology guru with a zero nerd factor. He is such a visionary and so considerate that I can never say no to any of his requests. Although it was never my plan to do any blogging, tweeting, or Facebooking, Tim walked me over the threshold, and I happily found a wonderland where I once imagined ogres. I am also grateful to Simon Cable, who read this book with such focus and comprehension that he created my online author interview, which distills the book's most important concepts into tantalizing invitations for others to try the offered neuro- logical strategies.

Jay McTighe has my highest respect as an educational visionary with the practical strategies to empower educators and academic policymakers with the courage to uplift even the most curriculum-burdened units of instruction and go beyond "covering" standards to "uncovering" durable knowledge. He has guidedand continues to guideeducators and administrators worldwide who admire and appreciate the logic of his approach and clarity with which he presents and writes about planning and teaching students. The information Jay shares enables educators to effectively change students' brains from being temporary resting places for isolated facts into active processing tools where concepts are born, are enriched, and become the tools of wisdom that students take with them far beyond the test and classroom walls. I am honored and grateful for Jay's friendship, guidance, and generosity. His tutelage has opened doors in my own brain, and his efforts on my behalf continue to extend the scope and reach available for me to share my information with educators. I give Jay the Lifetime Mensch Award.

I am grateful to Dawson and all my math students these past five years at Santa Barbara Middle School. Five years after Dawson was in my 7th grade algebra class, his mom sent me his college application letter. It contained the reinforcement that keeps us all teaching despite ever-increasing reasons for math negativity in our students. Dawson wrote, "My seventh grade math teacher, Dr. Judy Willis, a neuroscientist turned math teacher, was the first teacher to understand my brain and work with me to make it work for me. I started to see my mind as an asset of which to be proud instead of a detriment to my learning." What would we educators do without those students who give us their trust and persevere through challenge? Because we believe in them, they believe in us, and we change lives.

Of course, much love and gratitude is due to my husband Paul, who never pressures me to limit my speaking engagements or step away from my research journals and computer but gently tempts me with a glass of wine and an invitation to see a great sunset. Paul generously understands when I need to drive my own car to dinners with friends so I can leave before dessert if I start to obsess about rewriting a chapter for the fifth time or revising a presentation that was fine even before its third edit. I am so fortunate to be married to my college sweetheart.

I love and honor my mother, Norma Allerhand, who never "got" math, but never negated its value. She encouraged her children with the assurance that we were more than the sum of our genetic pool and could reach our own heights in math and all endeavors. I appreciate the wisdom I learned from Malana and Alani, my daughters. They helped me relate to parents who said their children eschewed their help with math because they didn't do it "the way the teacher does." My girls eventually trained me to understand that my support and confidence in them was more valuable than my hovering.

No other school subject pushes emotional buttons the way math does. It usually falls at the bottom of a list of subjects that people like or in which they feel interested or successful. Yet it's increasingly clear that building an education system that provides students with a strong foundation in math is important for both individuals and society.

From a broad perspective, today's world presents us with an increasing volume of information (from online sources, for example) that is not pre-filtered for accuracy or evaluated for all potential uses. Under these circumstances, the ability to make sound personal, financial, political, ethical, and social decisions requires mathematical thinking, careful observations, and sound deductions. These skills, in turn, utilize information that the brain validates and interprets using developed reasoning skills.

More specifically, a well-educated workforce is needed to handle increasingly complex technology. It is obvious that the people who employ auto mechanics or plumbers aren't looking for candidates with limited math knowledge to work on their customers' expensive cars or water filtration systems, no matter what technical skills those candidates might have. As the future quickly becomes the present, it is becoming clear that almost all professions (with human employees) will require some degree of mathematical thinking. Quite simply, this is because unpredictable problems inevitably arise for which creative solutions are required. Machines and computers don't possess the transferable conceptual knowledge required to address these problems. Reassuringly, it is for this reason that jobs will always be available for peopleas long as they have the foundational knowledge, conceptual understanding, and executive functions of the human brain's prefrontal cortex (PFC).

Mathematical thinking is a perfect example of the higher-order thinking that is unique to the prefrontal cortex. The executive functions of the PFC including personal responsibility, emotional response control, planning, prioritizing, gratification delay, organization, creative problem solving, critical analysis, judgment, prediction, and self-motivationare exactly the skills that 21st-century employers look for. They also represent what our globalized society requires in order to solve a wide array of problems both known and unknown. Though these executive functions are, most likely, still nascent in your students, your guidance and experiences will help your students recognize the inherent link between effort and progress and ultimately help them develop these necessary functions.

Students with mathematical competence also have other critical abilities, such as reasoning, abstraction, pattern and relationship recognition, and conceptual thinkingskills needed to use and apply knowledge in a variety of contexts (U.S. Department of Education, 2008). The processes used in logical-mathematical thinkingcategorization, classification, inference, generalization, calculation, and hypothesis testingare the foundations of higher-order thinking skills that transfer to other subjects beyond mathematics. These executive functions provide today's students with opportunities to be tomorrow's creative problem solvers. With these abilities, our students can charge into the 21st century with more preparation and confidence.