Author: Eric Z.

It’s Friday afternoon, around 2pm. My students are working on some word problems at the vertical whiteboards, engaged in the task and happily chatting about math (and who is dating who). I cycle around the room, red expo marker in hand. I check in with groups, circle an interesting strategy that students came up with to discuss during consolidation, and listen in to the math conversations. Class is humming along, brains are thinking. Things are going well.

And I’m completely exhausted.

After a full week of teaching, all I want is for the bell to ring, trudge to my car, drive home, check my mail, snuggle with Puck, then take a 2 hour nap. My Shadowrun gaming group is meeting at my place tonight, and I’ve got to get rest before we are up running the shadows until 1am.

I do my best to stay energized and positive, but my brain is getting fuzzy and I really need that bell to ring.

At long last, the weekend chimes ring out, and students rush out to do a million different things. I’d love to be right there with them, but I know that my Friday afternoon ritual needs to happen, otherwise next week will be much more challenging.

I’ve known many different types of educators in my time. Some can write their lesson plans on a post it note and leave school at 2:36pm. Others create entire manuals for each day, staying until 9pm each night (I do not recommend). A brave/foolish few just simply wing it each day (I do not recommend). On the spectrum of 1 being “winging it” to 10 being “massive over planner”, I’m about a 7. I can’t leave school without my agendas for the next week all set, the supplies organized, and my email inbox all clear. If I don’t check those off my list before leaving, my weekend is laced with stress and uncertainty.

So I shake off the cobwebs, steel myself, and spend the next couple of hours getting tasks done that “Monday morning me” will be very excited about. Copies are made, supplies organized and put away, test retakes are graded and recorded, Canvas is updated. I empty the late work bin and stamp the work, filing each away in its respective class folder. All the tasks that never seem to get done during the week are finally taken care of.

As I’m about to head out, weary but proud of myself, I open up my email one last time. The previous week we had an SST meeting for a student who has not been their best self this year. Math class has been a real struggle for them, and I expressed my frustration at the meeting about how I knew they were capable of so much more, but they kept spending their time and energy trying to be someone they are not. The parent was incredibly supportive of the teachers, administration, and their child. It was a really great meeting, and I was really hopeful to see some positive change.

And you know what? I did. 

This week the student was focused, worked really hard, and was much more positive in their words and actions. During our vertical whiteboard time they were a leader in their group, and figured out a new strategy for solving systems of equations by substitution. By Friday they were solving systems like a pro, with a happy smile on their face.

So before I left school, I made myself pause, sit down, and write the student’s parent an email to let them know how well their child did that week in class.  It took me about five minutes to write a simple message letting them know the positive things I saw their child do that week. 

I sent it off, then phoned a colleague for a few minutes before heading home. In that short span of time I had already received a reply from the parent, thanking me for the email and exclaiming how happy they were to hear the good news. I could almost see the smiling face behind the words.

It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by the everyday tasks of teaching. Grading, lesson planning, organizing, meetings, etc. It becomes a lot. I realize that I can be so focused on getting the “must get done” tasks finished, that I forget about the “should get done” and “this would be nice to do” tasks that can go a long way. A five minute email can really make somebody’s day better.

How many students do I have in my classroom who do the right thing, work hard every day, but don’t get the recognition they deserve because they don’t have a “look at me” type of personality? I bet I’ve had over a thousand students go through my classroom over the years who simply did the things I asked them to without being flashy about it and I took them for granted. 

So now I am determined to add one more item to my Friday afternoon ritual list: Send at least two happy emails home to parents, letting them know the awesome things their child did in math class this week.

10 minutes a week well spent.

You are back in middle school. Your haircut is phenomenal, your clothing choice is the height of modern fashion, and you just finished eating lunch with your friend group that is heavily skewed towards your own gender. (If you are being honest with yourself, only one of those statements is actually true). You head to math class and hunker down in your assigned seat. The bell rings, attendance is taken, and the teacher begins handing back your test from the previous week.

Close your eyes and imagine what the test looks like. How is it graded? What kind of marks are written on it? Is there a letter grade written at the top like the common Hollywood trope? Maybe a percentage? Perhaps there is a fraction that shows how many points you earned out of how many there were possible?

More important than that, how do you feel? What thoughts and emotions are running through your brain? Are you excited? Proud? Disappointed? Angry?

When you get the test back, do your thoughts immediately head towards beating yourself up for what you did wrong, or do you celebrate over what you knew how to do? I’m willing to bet it’s the former over the latter.

One of my biggest fears as a middle school math teacher is that I have contributed to the feelings of self-loathing and shame for thousands of children over the years because of the way I have graded exams. I have worked so hard over my career to teach with kindness and empathy. I try to be strict but fair with my students, and clear with my expectations. My goal is to make sure that every student knows they are valued, are important, and that they can learn math at a high level. No matter how hard I try, though, I cannot erase the probable trauma that I have caused because of the traditional grading system I used for so many years. 

As teachers we want to give feedback to our students they can use to develop their skills; Here is where you are, and here is what you need to work on to reach your goal. Seems simple enough. The problem is that providing this feedback to 150 students on a regular basis for one human being is virtually impossible. How do I find the time to give meaningful feedback to every student for every single Target or learning outcome they are expected to master in a single school year? For example, the Enhanced Math 1 course I teach has 37 different learning targets for the year. It’s…a lot. 

I think this is why education developed the letter-grade percentage based system in the first place. It really has that industrialized one-size-fits-all assembly line kind of feel to it, which makes sense since the first record of letter grades comes from the late 1800’s. Got a few hundred students to assess? Give them all the same test, assign points to each question, then assign them a grade based on their percentage. Seems simple, right?

There are so many problems with percentages, but for today I will just focus on one. A percentage doesn’t tell you what you know, and what you don’t know. I mean, it kind of does, but not really. The best example I have for this was presented by Cassandra Erkins at a district training I attended quite a few years ago.

Suppose you have three students take a test that covers 5 different skills. Let’s say there are 10 questions for each skill. Each student gets an 80%. Which student has mastered the content, which student needs a bit of support, and which student needs an intervention?

Impossible to know, right?

What if you looked at the test and saw how they did on each individual skill? Here’s the results by skill instead:

Which student gets the intervention time? Who has a pretty good grasp of all the concepts? Who needs a little bit more support?

It seems clear to me that Student #1 needs the most support, since they did not know how to do skill #5 at all. Student #2 has a pretty solid grasp on all of the skills, and Student #3 needs some additional support on skills 2 and 3. All of the students got an 80% on the test, but two of the three need more help. Unless you focus on the actual Targets, you might just say “80% is good enough” and 2 out of three students would not get the help they need.

Also, who’s to say that 80% is a good score anyway? I mean, it’s great for a hockey player’s shooting percentage, but it’s pretty terrible if it’s a surgeon’s mortality rate. Percentages are super subjective and don’t really tell you the whole story. So why do teachers use them?

Well, it’s easy, that’s why. It’s really easy to assign points to each question, grade them right or wrong, then give an overall percentage score. If you use an overall score, you never need to do the work of digging into the results and finding the Student #1’s in the class.

While overlooking student misconceptions is one harmful byproduct of using percentages to grade students, I would argue that the more harmful practice is that of students seeing themselves as that percentage. I’ve witnessed it a thousand times. Hand back a test to a student and the first thing they look for is the score. If it isn’t 100%, the next thing they look for is what they got wrong. Then they get mad at themselves for getting those things wrong. The phrases “I’m so stupid” and “Why did I do that” start flying around the room. Then students start arguing with you for more points in a desperate attempt to raise their grade. It’s a disturbingly toxic cycle I have seen happen over and over again. Instead of celebrating all of the things they knew how to do, they focus only on what they didn’t. What should be a moment of joyful learning inevitably becomes an anger and shame spiral.

So now I use Standards Based Grading in my classroom. I don’t give points or percentages. Students are assessed on specific Targets and are given feedback via a 4-point rubric that shows what they know, and what they still need to work on. When using the rubric I focus on the student’s overall understanding of the Target, and I don’t worry about small formatting mistakes. When I give back the assessment I always begin by having them celebrate what they are proud of. I listen closely for any student starting down the shame spiral and I try to intervene by highlighting what they did well. 

Is it a perfect system? Of course not. I don’t believe that one of those could ever exist. Is it better than what I used to do? Absolutely. The work is hard and time consuming, but the learning outcomes and mental health of my students is worth the time and effort. No child should ever reduce themselves to a numerical score, and I never want to contribute to that kind of thinking ever again.

I plan on writing in more detail about how our school has implemented Standards Based Grading in the future. If you would like more information on the practice, here are some of the best resources I have used:

The Grading Podcast

A Teacher’s Guide To Standards Based Learning

Formative Assessment & Standards Based Grading

The Standards Based Classroom: Make Learning the Goal

It’s the week before school begins. In less than 168 hours (which will be gone in what feels like 12 minutes) a large group of children will be in your classroom with varying degrees of motivation and multiple years of school experience informing their current demeanor. You gaze upon your empty learning space, thinking of ways to fill the void. Motivational posters, word walls, anchor charts, a handy rolling cabinet to keep art supplies accessible and organized. The possibilities are endless. You jot down your list of ideas, then head to Learning Trails, Target, or Office Depot to spend, spend, spend. Pretty soon your credit card has $500 more debt on it, but you have everything on your list and can’t wait to make the room look perfect. 

If you have taught for more than a few years, you can probably relate to this scenario. I know I do. This was my behavior for many, many years. If my classroom didn’t have something I thought it absolutely needed, I would go out and buy it. Seems simple enough. It’s all tax deductible if I buy it for my classroom, right? Yes, up to $300. I’ll get reimbursed from the school, won’t I? Maybe. One year I spent over $2,000 on my room and my students. Nobody taught me this mindset, as far as I can recall. For some reason I just felt like I was expected to spend my own money.

I know that I am not alone in this feeling. According to a report from Scott Winstead at My eLearning World, about 94 percent of teachers say they have spent their own money on their classroom at an average of about $820. 

While this most likely represents less than 2% of their average salary, $820 is a lot of money to many, many educators in this country. Personally, that pays for a full year of electricity bills, or two months of groceries, or almost two full seasons of ice hockey league fees, or 6 different Spartan races that I could enjoy. That rolling cabinet is nice, but I’d rather be playing ice hockey.

So, what are teachers spending their money on? In my early years I would spend about $100 per month at Costco for snacks I gave students who came after school for additional help. Sometimes it was last-minute supplies I needed for lesson ideas I thought up the day before. Excitement would get the best of me and I would rush out to Target to purchase everything I needed because I was not able to plan far enough in advance. This has declined in recent years because I usually try to manifest my idea digitally using Google Apps, which are free. For other educators, the spending varies from cleaning supplies (I bet this skyrocketed in 2020), to incentive prizes for students (or as I call it, learning by bribery), to classroom decorations (this has never been an issue for me).

After almost two decades I finally came to the realization that none of this out-of-pocket spending should be happening. I have a few reasons for this mindset shift, some of which are pragmatic, and a few that are more conceptual.

1. I Probably Don’t Need It

Over the years I’ve purchased so many things for my classroom that I thought would inspire my students or magically unlock their learning. Low-tech, high-tech, no-tech, most of them never made much of a dent. A well-chosen thinking task paired with effective student communication strategies wins 100% of the time. Technology is great, but I haven’t found anything that beats a good class debate in a room where every student feels safe to share their thinking.

2. Classroom Culture Isn’t Found In a Store.

Hear me out. Classroom decorations are nice and pretty, but they don’t actually create the warm environment you are hoping for. You do. Your words, actions, teaching strategies, and classroom management create the safe learning environment you are looking for, not the kitten poster on the wall. You can put a million colorful borders, posters, and inspirational quotes around the room, but it’s all fake if your actions don’t match what’s plastered around the room. Instead of agonizing over what your room looks like, take that time to reflect on your teaching at the end of each day and examine whether your words and actions matched what you value.

3. My School Does Have Money.

The school you work at most likely has more money in the budget than you think it does. At my school each teacher has a few hundred dollars to spend on classroom supplies that is gifted by the PTSA (thank you!). We also have an amazing front office staff that can order just about any office supply from the district warehouse or approved vendors and it can be there in sometimes a day or two. This requires decent planning skills, which I have improved at over the years. I bet if you find the right person at your site to ask, and can plan far enough ahead, you can find money in the budget for what you need.

4. We Shouldn’t Have To.

It is not your job to cash flow the supplies in your classroom. The school district receives funding through taxes and it is their job to supply you with the basic things you and your students need. If a school cannot supply its teachers and students with even the basic supplies they need for learning, there is a larger community issue at play. You spending hundreds or thousands of your own dollars to bridge the gap does not fix the structural problem, it only hides it. If you notice many of your students are hungry during the day, perhaps the schools need to consider more school-funded nutrition breaks rather than you buying food for them. 

5. I’m Perpetuating Stereotypes.

When you consistently purchase your own supplies, you further perpetuate the common societal belief that educators should be selfless heroes who constantly make sacrifices for their students because they love the profession and their students. That is an unrealistic, toxic stereotype that does more harm than good. Yes, there are teachers who practice extreme acts of kindness, empathy, and altruism on a regular basis because that’s just who they are and how they are wired. That is not the average person, and an entire profession should not be held to that standard. I don’t expect all baseball players to be Shohei Ohtani. That would be very unfair to the Trey Mancini’s of the world who are having a nice solid career, but not going to the Hall of Fame. It’s ok to be an above-average educator who is passionate about their job, but also has money to spend on their family and personal life.

So as you head into this school year, I implore you to think about why you might be spending your own money on your classroom. Are you not asking the right person? Do you need to work on medium and long term planning? Are you buying brand name items instead of using school provided supplies that work just as well? Are you hoping that your colorful walls will do the classroom management for you? Are you buying things you want rather than focusing on what the students truly need?

I’m guilty of all of these thoughts. When I have them I now I try to remind myself that no matter how much money I might spend on my classroom, it’s my words and actions that have the biggest impact on my students. Acts of kindness and empathy are free.

During my first few years of teaching I would arrive at school about an hour before the first bell would ring and those 60 minutes would fly by as I rushed to make sure everything was ready for the day. Sometimes I was lost in thought, repeatedly going through the mental reps of my lesson plan, trying to anticipate all of the things that could go horribly wrong. Other times it would be self-induced panic due to my brain coming up with a new idea the night before and I would be frantically trying to create my vision using an uncooperative table on Microsoft Word (seriously, why do tables never go where you want them to on that stupid program?). On other occasions I was desperately trying to finish grading an exam that I had held onto for weeks and promised the students I would return that day. As I sat in my classroom facing the school parking lot I would always spy the same couple of veteran teachers arriving at school 10 minutes before the first bell, calmly walking to class seemingly without a care in the world. How was that possible?

What secret did they know? Were they so incredibly organized and competent that they knew exactly how the day would go? Did they have years of lesson plans to fall back on and had the whole school year planned out already? Did they just never do anything new, so planning was a breeze? Did they utilize the classic 80’s grading strategy of “switch your paper with your seat neighbor and grade their work”? Did they grade nothing at all? Had they reached a level of complete apathy that it just didn’t matter what they did each day since they had tenure and only needed to tough it out for two more years in order to max out their pension benefits? Were they wizards? So…many…questions!

The longer I taught, and the more I got to know those veteran teachers, it really was a mix of all of those things, except maybe the wizardry. The longer you teach, the better you become at it. You make more efficient systems, learn better strategies, and gain valuable experience that allows you to innately anticipate student behavior, questions, and misconceptions. So now that I am entering year 20 of my teaching career, I’m able to arrive at school 10 minutes before the bell, right? Not a chance.

I still arrive an hour before the bell, and those 60 minutes still fly by. While I am more organized, and my grading practices have improved greatly, I still agonize over my lessons and frantically try to create things right before class starts. I change my agenda, come up with a new warm-up puzzle, or change the last question on a quiz because the other one just didn’t elicit the type of thinking I wanted to assess. I don’t think I’ll ever be a 10 minutes before the bell kind of teacher, because that’s just not who I am. Every single day of teaching is filled with large amounts of anticipation and anxiety, and if I didn’t arrive early, my whole day would be even more stressful than it already is.

Since I know this about myself, I have tried to be very intentional about reducing my stress and anxiety while at work, and to minimize the amount of work I do while not at work. If you know a teacher, you know they almost always take the job home with them pretty much every single day. They physically take the job home with stacks of papers to grade or lesson plans to make, or they mentally bring home the negative interaction they may have had with a parent, administrator, colleague, or student. The number of times I’ve lost an entire weekend because a negative parent email I read right before leaving work at 4:00pm on a Friday initiated an anxiety induced shame spiral is a non-zero number. Good luck sleeping this weekend, loser! 

Shame spirals are never ideal, and avoiding them is preferable. So what strategies and practices have I learned that help reduce how much work I actually take home?

1) Answer all emails before I leave work.

Keeping up with the email inbox can be a challenge, but it only gets exponentially worse if I don’t take care of it consistently. My common practice now is to not leave work until I have cleared out my inbox. This means I have gotten quite good at writing succinct, to-the-point emails that answer the question and nothing more. Most parent emails can realistically be answered in one paragraph or less. The 504 plan update I need to complete really only takes 10 minutes. The Google form my colleague needs filled out is done in under a minute. Just get it done, and get the heck out of there.

2) Establish clear email boundaries with parents and students.

At the beginning of the school year I establish the 4pm rule with my students and parents at Back To School Night. I don’t link my work email to my personal devices, so if they send me an email after 4pm, I won’t see it until the next school day. I make sure to stress that if a student is having a mental health crisis there are much more effective people to communicate with who are available any time of day. I am not a mental health professional, but I provide them with emails and phone numbers they can use in case of emergency.

3) Make all copies before I leave work.

The copy machine is a fickle beast whose services are in high demand in the early morning hours. There may or may not be paper, toner, staples, or time for your job to be completed. After many stressful mornings I have finally learned to make all of my copies before I leave for the day. This has greatly improved my morning anxiety. 

4) Only grade what is absolutely necessary.

Authentically grading student work and providing meaningful feedback is one of the most important and time consuming things I do. This practice takes a massive amount of time and energy. Knowing this, I have learned to strategically choose what I actually grade. I no longer grade any homework or much of the work done in class. Most of my classwork assignments are designed to allow students to correct their own work and assess themselves, so they have a clear picture of what they know, and what they still need to work on. When it comes time for an assessment that affects their actual grade I have time to do that because I am not inundated with scoring and recording meaningless busywork or random worksheets. I still take some of this home, but way less than I used to.

5) Keep a yearly paper calendar.

The school year is filled with special schedules, minimum days, early outs, lockdown/earthquake/fire drills, and professional development days. Knowing when all of these are at a glance is extremely helpful when planning a unit. Long term planning also relieves stress when it comes to supplies I might need for certain lessons. If I know I will be doing a lesson that requires students to use a large amount of sticky notes, I can ask ahead of time for those supplies at the front office. Sufficient planning ahead will mitigate the late night Target run the day before. I also like to have the paper calendar on my desk so I can always see it and it doesn’t rely on an internet connection. Paper never goes offline.

6) Sometimes average is good enough.

Not every lesson is amazing, nor will I be at my best every single day. While my goal is always 100% positive student engagement for every lesson, that almost never actually happens. If the lesson ends and I can honestly say that most of the students were highly engaged and felt safe in the room, I call that a win. I take some time after school to reflect and make some notes on what went well, what didn’t, and why. Then I move on.

Do I successfully implement all of these strategies every single day? Nope. Sometimes I break the 4pm email rule or forget to update my calendar. Once in a while I find myself grading a random classwork assignment and thinking to myself “why did I do this?”. On a drive home I’ll realize that I forgot to print some copies or update that IEP form. On average, however, I stick to these practices and I’m able to focus on my non teaching life once I leave my classroom for the day. One of my greatest joys in life is to come home without any work to do or think about and just do whatever I want (which is usually snuggle time with my perfect cat Puck).

What are some of the strategies you have implemented over the years to help reduce your own teaching anxiety and leave work at work? I’d love to know them. Please share!

I have a pretty strong memory of the first math lesson I ever taught. If I close my eyes I can picture the room, although many of the faces are a bit fuzzy at this point. There are six neat rows of desks, each with five single-student desks. All of the desks face the front, and eager 7th grade students fill each one. I hand out a quarter sheet of blank paper to each student and ask them to write a sentence or two about their experience with math in elementary school. Once they write down their responses I confidently say “Crumple up the paper and throw it in the trash! This is a new year, and you get to write a new math story for yourself. This year will be different!”. The students excitedly ball up their paper metaphor and hurl it towards the large trash bin I borrowed from the custodian. Students are smiling. I’m excited. Attitudes are positive and refreshed. 

What a lying liar I was.

Pretty much nothing I did in my first year was “new” or “different”. I was barely making it through each day, and I relied on what I had experienced as a student and what my colleagues told me to do. 

I didn’t innovate. I didn’t trail blaze. I survived. Almost every lesson was the same format, since it was all I knew how to do. I wrote notes on the overhead projector with my set of 4 Vis-a-Vis pens, and the students sat there and copied the notes down in their notebooks. If we finished the lesson early they could start their homework, or we might play a game.

Thrilling.

Any educator with at least a decade of experience can definitely look back and think of some teaching strategies or “not-so-best practices” they used to use and feel a huge sense of cringe. Here are my top 3.

1) The Cold Call

One job that I thankfully have never had to endure is that of the cold calling salesman. The thought of randomly calling a name on a list and trying to sell them something raises my anxiety level to DEFCON 3. Forget the concept of knocking on a random person’s door and being like, “Do I have a food storage system for you!”. Just… no. I cannot do it. If that’s the case, then why was I fine with randomly calling on students in the middle of my lesson, just hoping they would know the answer and be confident enough to say it out loud? 

It is my belief that when you cold call on a “random” student, it’s almost never really random (unless you are using some kind of truly random system, such as a random number generator). Unconscious bias (or maybe even conscious, if we are truly being honest) leads you to choose students you know are not paying attention, or those who are less likely to raise their hand. It works more as a classroom management/punishment strategy than it does a method of eliciting knowledge and vigorous classroom debate. It’s a negative method of keeping students “engaged” and “paying attention”, not because the lesson is so engaging, but because students are fearful that they might be randomly called on and possibly look foolish in front of their peers. 

Have I used this in the past? Absolutely. Do I still do it now? Sadly, sometimes. Old habits die hard. Edutopia’s article this past April tackles this topic in more detail, and suggests 8 ways to make this a more positive strategy. It is my hope that I remove this strategy from my daily teaching practice once and for all. I strive for a classroom where students work in teams to tackle challenging, engaging thinking tasks that foster rich discussion that students want to be a part of. If you have to force them to participate or pay attention, the lesson isn’t good.

2) The Hunger Games

Middle school introduces many new social situations to children that are inherently anxiety inducing. The convergence of two or more 6th grade student groups, all with their own ingrained social dynamics, can cause friend groups to splinter and crumble. Many students begin their first forays into dating (mostly via text message over a hormone flooded 24-hour period). For some kids just the act of changing clothes for P.E. can be terrifying. Every day, possibly every hour, can introduce a new stressful social scenario. Knowing this, why did I ever let students choose their own groups?

When I first started assigning group projects I would always begin by trying to hook the students with an engaging introduction to get them excited about the work. One of my favorite projects was when I had my 7th grade students design their own homes. I handed out model home floor plans, discussed the budget they would have, and how many square feet they could use. No matter how hard I tried, however, students would start to do the social mental math and try to figure out who they could work with. Eyes darted across the room, making contact with possible partners. Many groups would be chosen non-verbally before I even presented the rules. Invariably, some students would be left out. 

Heterogeneous, homogeneous, teacher chosen, student chosen. It honestly doesn’t matter. All of the traditional methods of choosing groups include bias, either by the teacher or the students. When the teacher chooses heterogeneous groups strategically, students tend to assign themselves roles based on their own self-perception. “James is in this group, and he has an A in the class, so he is meant to be the leader. I’ll just stay quiet then”. Peter Liljedahl discusses this phenomenon at length in his book Building Thinking Classrooms (and I discuss it in more depth here). A homogeneous group frequently lacks diversity of thought. When students choose their own groups all sorts of social factors come into play, which almost certainly disadvantages some individual students (in my experience, students on the Autism spectrum and neurodivergent thinkers often get left out by their peers). 

I choose to select groups as randomly as possible. The Picker Wheel app makes all of my groups completely random, and I spin the wheel in front of the whole class. Whether we work at the vertical thinking stations, sit in table groups, or convene for a large project, I let the random number generator decide. This removes much of the social anxiety of students finding their own groups, and absolves me of any bias I might bring. Yes, students still get grouped with others they don’t get along with at times, but part of life is learning how to work with others. Let fate take the wheel!

3) The Ticking Time Bomb

One of the most common Hollywood tropes is that of the ticking time bomb. The hero discovers the nefarious device and must frantically work to figure out how to disarm it. If they are lucky, the hero has a knowledgeable colleague on the other end of an earpiece calmly giving detailed instructions. At the very last moment, the hero cuts the correct wire and the day is saved. Hooray.

This type of actual bomb scenario pretty much never happens in real life. Yet, educators across the country (including my early teaching self) recreate this same situation on a daily basis with their students when teaching mathematics. How, you ask? Well, it’s our old friend the “Timed Fact Test”. 

In an effort to instill math fluency, thousands of educators every day give hundreds of thousands of students little sheets of math fact problems that they must complete in a certain amount of time. Some even have elaborate reward systems for students who reach certain time benchmarks. I even remember doing this as an elementary school student, with my 6th grade teacher adding in the caveat of saying random numbers out loud while we worked to throw us off even more. I honestly can’t think of a worse teaching strategy. 

I also can’t believe I used to do this in my own classroom. Now, in my room it wasn’t basic math facts, but rather perfect squares up to 625 and certain formulas such as volume of a cylinder or area of a trapezoid. I printed out half sheets of paper and gave students two minutes to complete them by memory. 

Why two minutes? Hell if I know. 

Did they really need to memorize those numbers and formulas? Nope. The internet exists.

Why did I do that? I have no clue. 

How much anxiety and trauma did I cause students every Friday when I gave those tests? No way to tell, but it’s not zero, that’s for sure.

Jo Boaler’s article in 2012 suggests “timed tests are the direct cause of the early onset of math anxiety” and that “Math anxiety affects about 50 percent of the U.S. population…” If we have known this for more than a decade, why are we still doing it? Searching the phrase “math facts fluency timed tests” on Teachers Pay Teachers gives over 2,700 search results.

Ask yourself this question. When was the last time in your life that you had to do quick mental math under great pressure. I’ll wait. The only time I encounter this in my life is when I play Dungeons & Dragons, and even then I’m not being timed. Yes, I need to do some mental math to add my dice rolls. No, I’m not timed nor is there a dire consequence if I am slow.

Yes, math fluency is important. The better a student’s fluency is, the more time and space their brain has for tougher cognition tasks when they get to subjects like percentages, fractions, algebra, and beyond. Do timed tests develop and assess fluency? No. They only create frustration and anxiety, which makes math even harder for students to learn.

I stopped giving timed memorization tests around 2017 (yes, I was also late to the party). They will never happen in my classroom again. There are no bombs about to go off in the classroom. Let’s stop acting like there are.

Those are my greatest teaching strategy regrets. Care to share yours in the comments? Own your shame, knowing that we are always doing our best, but also always looking to learn and improve.

P.S. – To all of my former students who I gave timed tests to: I’m sorry. Please forgive me.