What Counts Episode 2: Math is emotional.
[Transcript]
Sergio Luya
The most popular quote you hear as a math teacher is that I'm just not a math person, or I don't, you know, I'm not good at math.
Kayla Fulghum
Math is scary, math is hard.
Michele Knowles
And it makes me so sad. But that's, that's what I see from them. Somewhere along the way, they lost their love of math.
Celena Crews
Kids don't usually like cry in their other classes, but I can't tell you the number of kids I've had cry in math class.
Sergio Luya
I heard one student, and this is, this is insane to me. They said that there was a teacher who, one time, gave them back a test and stapled in a McDonald's application on it.
Anna Stewart
I think just over time, when you feel like you're not good at something and or you've seen you struggle in a certain area, you become deflated and so you're not as eager to even try.
Danielle LeCourt
Math isn't just about numbers. It's a subject that can spark strong feelings, creating both moments of triumph and moments of struggle, which raises the question, what makes math such an emotional subject, and what role do relationships play in navigating that.
Danielle LeCourt
This is What Counts, a podcast presented by Impact Florida and produced by De LeCourt as part of the Math Narrative Project. I'm Danielle LeCourt. When I asked teachers what makes math different, the answers came quickly. It's not just the formulas or the tests. It's the emotions that ride along with every equation.
Celena Crews
I think any math teacher who spent a decent amount of time in the classroom can tell you that teaching and learning math is emotional, and it can be highly emotional, and over the years, I've had a long list of students who struggled emotionally with the challenge that comes with math.
Danielle LeCourt
This is Celena Crews again, you met her in episode one. And when she talks about math being emotional, she's not just talking about stress over numbers on a page. She's talking about something deeper, the way math can shape how students see themselves.
Celena Crews
But why is it in our society that it's so common to say, Oh, I can't do math. You know, I…you talk, end up talking to people, meeting people. Oh, what do you do for a living? I'm a math teacher. What do you teach calculus? Like, oh, no, I can't do math. So I don't know. It's just it's emotional. It's emotional for teachers, it's emotional for students, and it's definitely emotional for parents.
Danielle LeCourt
Yeah, it's emotional for me listening to this.
Celena Crews
So, it's interesting, because I don't know that any other subjects follow this, where students identify as being good at or not being good at, right? You don't really hear kids talk about like, Well, I'm not good at English, or I am good at English, or, you know, whatever, or science, you know, they may like one science subject, not like another science subject, but with math, it really is an identity.
Danielle LeCourt
And for some teachers, those doubts show up on day one. This is Kayla Fulghum, an algebra and geometry teacher in Naples, Florida.
Kayla Fulghum
I teach intensive math, so I tend to have students who have challenges that have occurred long before, and a lot of these challenges really were heightened in when covid happened and everybody went home, and math is not something that you can learn from a computer very well, unless you understand math and you do well at math. And most of the students at our levels that we see in algebra and geometry, they don't like math. They don't like coming to the class. Math is scary. Math is hard.
Danielle LeCourt
And that's the heart of it. For students, math isn't just an academic subject. It's personal success or struggle becomes part of who they believe they are, and those beliefs often follow them well beyond the classroom. It can be a reflection of their sense of competence, their confidence and even their future possibilities. And those feelings don't stay neatly contained within the classroom. They spill over into how students see themselves far beyond math.
Sergio Luya
The most popular quote you hear as a math teacher is that I'm just not a math person, or I don't, you know, I'm not good at math.
Danielle LeCourt
That's Sergio Luya, a high school math teacher at Leto High School in Hillsborough County, one of the largest school districts in the country. Day after day, in classes packed with students, he hears that same phrase over and over, I'm just not a math person.
Sergio Luya
I feel like students walk into a math classroom with more shields and barriers than in most other subjects. And I mean, I don't know if there's a study that shows this, but I bet you, if I had to bet my money on it, more. Kids feel shut down and negative about stepping into a math class than they do any other class.
Danielle LeCourt
And those doubts don't show up all at once. They build test by test, year by year, until a student carries them like armor, and sometimes that armor comes from something harsher, like this story Sergio heard from a student.
Sergio Luya
Like, there is one teacher who has told me, like, oh, that if you don't know how to do this, then you should go right down the road on to the elementary school and go back to second grade, just if a student didn't remember, like, a simple multiplication or something like that. Or there have been teachers who, I heard one student, and this is, this is insane to me, but like they said that there was a teacher who, one time gave them back a test and stapled in a McDonald's application on it. And I'm just thinking to myself, like, that's crazy to me. Like the and I, you know, I maybe the teacher meant to be funny, but those things really leave a mark on students, and it's one of those things that sometimes, sometimes it's it's even harder for me to undo that damage that was done to them.
Danielle LeCourt
So, it's a reminder that the way teachers speak to students can change how a young person sees themselves. And while some students have outright horror stories like this, many more describe something quieter and almost invisible--the small ways they come to feel like they don't belong.
Sergio Luya
And then sometimes, when they tell these stories to me, I also feel like, Oh my God. I feel like I've done stuff like that before too. So and then, and it's, it's like a very you know, you have to be introspective every time you hear one of those stories and think, have I been like that before?
Danielle LeCourt
I'm glad you were talking about... you said that point about, like, oh my gosh, I've done that. Because I've heard this now several times in these interviews, that students have some kind of experience that really turns them off and turns them away from math. And I want to believe that maybe, like, teachers don't know that that's happening, and when you need a certain amount of self reflection. How is it that some of these situations surface from the teacher's perspective? Probably, I'm going to say, unknowingly.
Sergio Luya
Well, I think as math teachers, we make a lot of assumptions. For example, there was a girl who practically wrote me a novel, and I and she, she wrote in there, and she was very honest and very blunt in there. She said that you keep making assumptions that we know prerequisite knowledge and we don't, and a lot of times it's the phrasing that we use, even, even if we don't use the harshest language, for example, like, I'll just use, I'll use logarithms as kind of one of the things that we need, or one of the one of the skills that they need to answer certain derivative problems in calculus. Sometimes I would start the class and be like, All right, so you guys have seen logarithms before. So you should remember, when you see an expression that looks like this, you apply these rules. And then kids, they hear me say that, and they would say, yes, of course, we remember that, but they're already shut down because of that statement. They say they're but what's going what's really going on in their heads is they're like, I did not remember that, and now I feel like an idiot, because, based off of the way that Mr. Luya is saying starting off the class, I feel like I should know this, but I don't. I'm an idiot. I'm not going to open my mouth in class.
Danielle LeCourt
And Sergio isn't alone. Again and again, teachers told me about the moments when they discovered how their own choices were shaping how students felt in math class,
Michele Knowles
My second class of students, they were ninth graders when I had them, and about halfway through the year, some of my results started going down.
Danielle LeCourt
This is Michelle Knowles, a high school math teacher who's taught everything from second grade through advanced high school courses. By the time she met this group of ninth graders, she had begun using surveys to ask her students directly how things were going in her classroom, what felt supportive to them, and what was getting in the way.
Michele Knowles
I had one student she wrote, well, not saying things like you should already know this, because it makes us feel dumb. And then another student on an at another table said Yeah, and saying that we learned this in fourth grade hurts our self esteem because maybe we forgot it, or maybe we don't remember it, or maybe our fourth grade teacher wasn't very good.
Danielle LeCourt
These weren't students she didn't know. Two of them had been in her class the year before, and one was even the daughter of a colleague. And still, they were telling her that her words, words she thought were encouraging, were actually making them feel smaller.
Michele Knowles
And that just devastated me, because I had good relationships with them. And here they were telling me that I was hurting their self esteem. So it was completely devastating. And after I stopped crying about it, I figured out how to fix it, which was now when I introduce an old content, something they should be familiar with which that's why I said it. It wasn't to hurt their self esteem if they didn't know it. I was trying to make them feel better. Like, okay, this is something old. This is something not new to you. You're going to be fine. But what they were hearing was, if I don't know it, then I'm stupid. So now, instead of introducing it that way, I introduce topics that are coming back up, like division, that comes up in fourth grade, and then again in sixth grade, and now we're doing it with polynomials. Instead of saying, you know how to divide, I say, remind me of our steps to division, because division for polynomials is the same as it was for your rational numbers. So help me walk through the steps. So instead of me just saying they should remember it, I'd let them show me and everyone else and themselves that they do remember it.
Danielle LeCourt
Stories like Michelle's and Sergio's show how quickly classroom moments can shape the way students think about themselves, and those moments don't just affect the ones who are behind as Selena has seen, even the so called strong math kids aren't immune.
Celena Crews
You know, when you're talking about like the remedial, the struggling student, you know, a lot of times with them, it's just building up that confidence, because it's not that they can't do the math, it's that they believe they can't do the math, whereas at the calculus level, they've already been super successful. They're already going to graduate high school, right? They're already they're already there. They have more math credits than they need to graduate, right? So it's a different part of their identity, like with the struggling students, with those intensive math students, right? Passing that test is allowing them to graduate high school, whereas at the calculus level, for some of them, being successful in that class or passing that test, it's like a mind game in terms of what they want to do with their life, right? Because a lot of them, they want they're in that class because they want to do something that's going to use that higher level math, you know, whether it's engineering, some sort of science or something. So for them, when they that's what they've always wanted to do, and then they struggle. They start to question, they start to question their future and their plans, and sometimes that is an incredibly emotional experience for them.
Danielle LeCourt
Whether it's the student who has always struggled or the one who's always excelled, math can stir up some of the deepest feelings of self doubt and self belief, and that's why relationships matter so much. A teacher's words, a choice to listen, a moment of care. Those things don't just change how a student solves a problem, they can change how a student sees themself. So in our next episode, we'll ask, if math is this emotional, how do teachers actually build the kind of trust and connection that helps students move through it. This series is produced by De LeCourt. I'm Danielle LeCourt. Thanks for listening.
