Motivating Students Who Hate Math

No matter how a student responds to mathematics – loving it, engaged, uninterested or consider it absolutely stressful – they need to be taught in accordance with their learning styles and mindset. While so much has been researched and written about learning styles I have seen very little on mind set and education, and most of those have been in reference to psychology papers.

I am blogging today about reaching those students who dislike math. Think of something that you detest doing. For me, it is washing the car. Think about how you get yourself motivated for what ever chore it is. I know for a fact if my husband handed me the car wash bucket and implements – well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be a pretty conversation – and I would dread the task even more. 

 Change The Focus

It is no different from students who hate math. What is the first thing they see when they enter the classroom? It is the homework written on the board, a math warm up, or do they go directly to their math books which has math equations staring back at them?

Change it up!! Whenever possible start you warm up activity with nothing directly related to math. I say directly because the activity will end up being related to math.  It is kind of like hiding vegetables in food for children.

Let me use slope as an example. One of my warm ups for slope is to show houses with different sloped roofs. Such as:

 

 

 

 

Start with a discussion with the slope of the roofs. The first house is in Los Angeles, the second in the mountains, and the third is in Palm Springs, California.

How are the roofs different?  Why do you think they are?

Answer: weather

The first house is in LA where you have rain (yup we do . . . . once in a while) and extremely rarely a dusting of snow. The second home is in the mountains with a lot snowfall, and the third is in Palm Springs which does not have snow. This brings you to the discussion of the different angles of the roofs. In the mountains it needs a steep slope to keep the snow from building up. While, Palm Springs has no snow and an average rainfall of just 4.85″ per year.

So, the discussion becomes about weather. From there take the class to how architects would have to know how to tell the builders what angle to build the roof – and there is your lead-in to slope.