5: Thinking & Culture

Thinking and culture play a hand in hand role in mathematics. When the culture surrounding math is negative about it and makes math seem difficult and impossible, you create an environment where students do not want to engage or learn anything. The environment about which a subject is taught affects how the subject is seen and used by both students and teachers. When teachers feel like the subject is not responding well with the students or that the students do not seem to like it, teachers often them try to continue on with the topic and just struggle through it. This is not effective however, and the students suffer more as they strengthen their feeling on the subject material. By changing our attitudes and in turn changing the education environment we can portray math as something to discover and learn, and not as something tedious and difficult. The environment affects our learning and so to fix our learning, we should start with the environment in which we learn and teach.

Daniel Pink’s talk on motivation is important when learning how to motivate students in classes to do well, or to pay attention, or to do their work. Motivation must come from the student, and if they do not feel motivated, they will not try. We often try to bribe our students, with the promise of a pizza day or a study hall. These incentives may work for some topics or problems, but not for the whole subject material. In math, abstract thinking is required. Students need to be able to see a problem and think of the ways to solve, then choose one way to solve it, and so forth. They are limited when we put incentives in front of them because we are trying to motivate them, when they should be motivating themselves. Having students feel like they are in control, or like what they want to learn matters is important to their motivation. If the students feel like they have the time to explore math, then they have the opportunity to explore math, and finally they learn something from exploring math, they will have the motivation to continue doing the same and increasing their knowledge.

Neural plasticity has shown that to learn something, to truly learn it, does not occur in a single class or in a single event. It takes time, practice, and consistency to learn something. This is something that many classes to not have. With chapters being covered in a week, then moving on to something else. True mastery of a subject requires consistent practice and exposure. Our brains can form the “learned” idea in one session, but that does not last until the next day for most people. We need to consistently practice so that our brains can form changes in order for our learning to be established.

Multitasking has been thought to be something required for everyone to do and do successfully. But the data presented shows that by multitasking, we take attention away from one thing, and give it to another. The common idea that we split or share the attention equally is a myth. We switch attention from one thing to another. This means we stop focusing on one thing, and start focusing on something else forgetting what we had just done on the previous thing. This is always good, since multitasking can lead to decreased quality of work or understanding of a material.