Rebecca Zook - Math Tutoring Online

Looking back at how I responded so insensitively to my student who cried during our tutoring session, I’m stunned by my in-the-moment lack of compassion. Because… I cried myself to sleep over my algebra homework throughout most of eighth grade! It’s still vivid in my mind: sitting on my twin bed with my algebra book in my childhood bedroom, with its pink hearts and flowers wallpaper, struggling to finish my homework and crying with sheer frustration.

I loved math as much as any other subject until I hit 6th grade and was introduced to pre-algebra for the first time. Isolating for a variable, balancing an equation, the order of operations—none of this made any sense to me. I would go to my teacher for help, and he would patiently try to explain it to me, but it still didn’t make any sense. I made the same mistakes over and over and over without gaining any understanding or insight.

I have absolutely no memories of seventh grade math, but eighth grade math burns in my memory: sitting in class, trying to do the problems, approaching my teacher’s desk, asking him to explain it to me, dutifully nodding even though I still really didn’t understand, returning to my desk, and feeling overtaken by numb despair.

I’m not sure if his explanations didn’t make sense to me because he always explained everything the same way, or if he had a variety of explanations but none of them clicked with my learning style. He was a sweet, patient man, but his explanations did not help me to learn.

Now that I’m a math tutor, when I remember all those eighth grade nights, crying myself to sleep over my algebra book, I ask myself, why didn’t I think of getting a tutor? I never thought about asking anyone but my math teacher for help. I didn’t ask my friends, I didn’t ask my parents, I didn’t ask other teachers. It never even crossed my mind to try to switch to another teacher, or get another book. Why?

Maybe I wasn’t aware that these options were available. Or maybe I felt somewhere deep inside that, as a student who had a passion for learning and a capable reputation, asking for a tutor would be an admission of defeat. Or maybe it seemed “easier” to think of those nights of algebra tears as isolated incidents instead of taking on the “larger project” of trying to find a better solution for myself.

But paradoxically, I think this experience made me a better tutor. Many of the students who come to me might be completely frustrated and far behind. Maybe they don’t have anyone else they can turn to for help. Maybe they’ve never found a textbook that works with their brain. Maybe they are crying themselves to sleep over their algebra homework. Just like I did.

Related Posts:
When Persistence Isn’t Enough
The Downside of Always Telling Students To Try Harder
The Downside of Always Telling Students To Try Harder (2)
Algebra Tears

I recently posted about Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s recent report on the downside of always telling kids to try harder.

As someone who cried herself to sleep over her middle school math homework, I know that trying harder isn’t always the solution.

I believe the real solution is not to try harder, but to try again, differently: with a new tool, or with a different approach, or even just after taking a break to refresh your mind.

Perhaps the reason why some of the Chinese students discussed in the article (or students anywhere in the world) appear to have more of an “innate willingness to work hard” is just because they’ve learned how they learn most pleasurably and effortlessly. Maybe they’ve learned how to create flow states for themselves so they enjoy what they’re doing, instead of just grinding it out.

As a learner, I feel like the most useful thing I can do is examine how I learn best. And when I’m learning that way, it might not even feel like I’m working hard—it might actually feel effortless! From the outside, it might look like I’m a “hard worker,” but actually, I just don’t want to stop, because I’m in the zone.

As an educator, I feel like my own role is to help students learn how they learn best—so they can choose to learn what they want to learn, how they want to learn it, and do what they want to do, how they want to do it. Not just in school, but for the rest of their lives.

There’s always going to be some sort of gap between the way people teach us and the way we best learn. Our task is to find out how to create our own optimal conditions, no matter what we’re given.

Related Articles:
The Downside of Always Telling Students to Try Harder (1)
Power of Praise (1)
Algebra Tears

Over on their Newsweek NurtureShock blog, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman recently posted an awesome article about the downside of always telling kids to work harder.

The article explores a conundrum. In the US, recent research on praise indicates that we should praise students for their process, not for any perceived “innate qualities.” “Process praise” (such as, “I love the colors you used in your painting, can you tell me how you picked them?”) is constructive, because you can control your process and effort. But praising someone’s innate qualities (“You’re such a great artist!”) is not helpful because you can’t control your innate qualities. And kids will do anything to hold on to a positive label—including no longer taking risks that might show the label to be untrue. (For example, only making paintings they think others will approve of, or that would support the “great artist” label.)

Here’s the kicker. In the US, we believe that the amount of effort we put in is something we can control. But in China, where the emphasis is already on effort (a variable that we in the US believe we can control), many Chinese students believe that their ability to try hard is a fixed trait beyond their control.

I thought that the crux of the article was that teachers in China don’t teach strategies. They just tell students to try harder, but they do not tell students how to apply effort more skillfully.

However, I don’t think that this problem is limited to the Chinese educational system—American educators do it too. (The Chinese schoolteacher’s instructions to “try harder” reminds me of Rafe Esquith’s observations that math teachers in the US frequently tell struggling students to “read it again” or “use their head,” even though he’s never seen any teacher get results with these instructions. Which is understandable—they’re not strategic instructions. So Chinese educators are not alone in having this problem.)

To take a step back, let’s consider the research that forms the background for this article’s discussion of education in China: the work of psychologist Carol Dweck. Her groundbreaking research into the effects of praise on children’s motivation is frequently summarized this way: you should praise students for effort because it’s something students can control.

But Carol Dweck isn’t just saying that we should praise kids for their effort—she’s saying that we should praise their process, and also help them explore their process.

Related articles:
When Persistence Isn’t Enough

I’ve been so impressed and intrigued with Malcolm Gladwell’s observations on the relationship between persistence and success in math. So, at an appropriate moment, I eagerly told one of my students about the woman Gladwell describes in Outliers, who kept trying to understand the slope of a vertical line until she finally got it after quite some time.

“How long do you think she kept working on that problem?” I asked my student.

“I don’t know,” my student said. “Maybe three hours?”

Then it hit me. I want all of my students to cultivate persistence, and some of my students definitely need to work harder. But maybe the woman I was telling my student about wasn’t exceptional because she kept trying. Maybe she’s exceptional because she kept trying and she finally got it.

What if students are already persistent and diligent and still not able to understand the material? Is telling them to persist and try harder really the answer?

When I was in middle school, I was an extremely diligent Latin student. I would dutifully copy out the text we were translating, look up every single word in the dictionary and in declension and conjugation charts, and list my English translation under the Latin word. Then I would randomly try to string the words together into a complete sentence.

For whatever reason, my Latin teacher adored me and repeatedly praised my thorough preparation in front of the class. But wasn’t it completely obvious that I had absolutely no idea what was going on?

Even though she was a world-reknowned Latin scholar who cracked jokes in fluent Latin with her friends at the Vatican, she didn’t seem to notice (or care) that I had no idea how the Latin words worked together to create meaning.

Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I didn’t understand her explanations. Or maybe she never actually explained it. Even though I was totally clueless, I got straight As in Latin for three years. But my effort was not enough. I never understood Latin.

It happened to me in other classes too. When I was an Algebra 2 student, I’d work on a math problem until I got totally stuck, and I’d approach the teacher’s desk for help. “You need to try harder to figure it out for yourself,” he’d tell me dismissively, and then send me back to my desk.

Now, some of my students confide in me that when they ask their teacher a question, the teacher responds, “If you had been paying attention when I explained it, you wouldn’t need to ask that question. So shut up and pay attention!” But the student was paying attention, and still didn’t understand!

It’s clear that “trying harder” and “paying more attention” aren’t going to fix anything if the effort is misguided, or if what you’re paying attention to doesn’t make sense in the first place. So why are students chastised to work harder and pay more attention as if those are the only variables in the equation that can be changed? I’ve found that frequently the missing link isn’t more effort or focus, but a better explanation or an alternative version of the procedure.

Students (and teachers) can actually change many variables in the equation. They can get a book that works better for them, ask someone else for help in hopes of getting a better explanation, watch an instructional video, or even switch to a different instructor entirely.

Maybe teachers hesitate to encouage students to explore these alternatives because it might undermine their authority. But it’s to the detriment of many hard-working and attentive students who struggle in silence, mistakenly believing that if they just try harder or pay more attention they’ll finally get it—or fearing that if they don’t, they must be incapable.

I’ve really been enjoying Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book, Outliers. There’s so much good stuff in this book about the relationship between learning math and: language, cultural attitudes, and agriculture (?!!) that I can’t even describe it all here–you should really just read the whole thing!

One juicy niblet in particular from the book really struck me:

A few years ago, Alan Schoenfeld, a math professor at Berkeley, made a videotape of a woman named Renee as she was trying to solve a math problem. [… ] Twenty-two minutes pass from the moment Renee begins playing with the computer program to the moment she says, “Ahhhh. That means something now.” That’s a long time. [The researcher Schoenfeld remarked,] “If I put the average eighth grader in the same position as Renee, I’m guessing that after the first few attempts, they would have said, ‘I don’t get it. I need you to explain it.’” Schoenfeld once asked a group of high school students how long they would work on a homework question before they concluded that it was too hard for them to solve. Their answers ranged from thirty seconds to five minutes, with the average answer two minutes.

But Renee took twenty-two minutes! Gladwell goes on to explain:

We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have “it” or you don’t. But to Schoenfeld, it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you’re willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persitence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Gladwell doesn’t try to explain what made Renee so exceptional. But it definitely made me wonder what I can do to help my students cultivate these qualities in themselves.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the time one of my students broke down and cried during a tutoring session. I was working with a ninth grader who was struggling in her Algebra II class. She had a great teacher, but she’d gone to a “progressive” elementary school where she’d never learned to do long division—apparently the school’s philosophy was that students would just “figure it out.”

We were seated at an enormous wooden table in the beautiful Boston Public Library. Her math book was opened in front of us, and her enormous backpack rested on a nearby chair. I think we were working on completing the square, which challenges many students. We’d been working on it for several sessions, and my student became extremely frustrated.

Basically, she told me she didn’t want to go on, and didn’t want to do any more work. And then she started to cry. I started to panic. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to “act professional”? Should we take a break? Weren’t her parents paying me a lot of money to have her do math? I couldn’t just sit here and let her NOT do math!

In my panic, I started to ask her a series of idiotic questions, and the conversation went something like this:
“What will happen if you don’t finish this homework assignment?”
“I won’t understand the material.”
“And then when you take the test, what will happen?”
“I won’t do well.”
“And then what kind of grade will you get?”
“I’ll probably fail.”
“And then what will happen?”
“I’ll probably have to take the class again.”
Wow, talk about encouraging my student to visualize failure! Then I said something even more totally idiotic like, “If you don’t want to repeat Algebra 2, then we need to work on completing the square right now.”

Things continued in this vein until it was time to walk down to the lobby of the library where her parents picked her up.

Afterwards, I was so confused about what had happened. I was afraid that I had totally blown it and that this student would probably never want to talk to me again. And obviously I wasn’t a good tutor for her if she cried on me during tutoring.

I pre-emptively called her Mom and explained that the session hadn’t gone so well and that the student had cried. The Mom actually told me that that was a good sign—that her daughter would only cry in front of someone who she really trusted!

In my next meeting with the student, I apologized and told her I was sorry that I had stressed her out. Paradoxically, from that session onward, my student’s attitude toward math totally changed.

It was almost like the breakdown set the stage for a breakthrough. After weeks of struggling with the completing the square, she found an awesome new way to approaching it using a drawing of a square (more on that later). Even though none of my previous explanations had clicked, this approach made immediate intuitive sense to her. And we spent another great year and a half working on math together.

Looking back on how I handled her crying in tutoring, I feel like it was one of my lowest points as a tutor. Obviously it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if we took a break, or even if my student ended up repeating the class.

If I could live that moment again, I would have handled it totally differently—asked my student if she wanted a hug, packed up, and taken her to Starbucks. I’m amazed that our relationship wasn’t ruined by my insensitive response to her algebra tears. And I’m grateful to my student, for forgiving me for my ineptness, having the guts to keep going after that session, and teaching me a huge lesson about how to handle breakdowns.