Analysis: Part I
In any classroom there are students who are accomplished athletes, some are musically gifted, and others who are talented comedians. Similarly, there are a handful of students that are simply good at school. If an individual is “fortunate enough to have a combination of linguistic and logical strengths…academics will be relatively unproblematic for them” (Sadowski, 2008, p. 187). I was not one of those fortunate few. When I was in high school I failed multiple math tests and grappled with concepts that other students grasped with ease. I would get extremely frustrated when I studied days for an exam and did worse than friends who studied relatively little. Why were my efforts not paying off? Why was I not getting the grade I thought I deserved? What was I doing wrong? My high school math teacher, Mr. Okla, assured me that even though I was not getting the grade I wanted he could tell that my hard work was paying off. He said that my mathematical understanding greatly improved since the beginning of the year and I would soon see the benefits of my efforts.
Initially his advice was frustrating because all I wanted was an A in his class, but Mr. Okla was right, my efforts did pay off, but not in the way I thought they would. That experience forced me to start appreciating the learning process as opposed to fixating on my results. I spent so much of the year worrying about my grade that I failed to value my significant growth as a math student. Eventually, when I took Calculus AB, a course I thought I was going to fail, I was surprised that the material was actually making sense. When “successful people encounter small setbacks on the way to achieving success, they learn that sustained effort and perseverance are key ingredients for that success: in other words they develop resilient self-efficacy” (Duckworth & Carlson, 2013). Many individuals assume that they are doomed to perform poorly if they are not some type of genius and therefore resist putting forth any type of effort. They allow past performances in math classes to dictate their future performance. However, my own experience in my classes proved to me that this was not the case. Thus, when I first started teaching, I told my students that the first step to becoming a “good” math student was to challenge themselves to spend less time thinking about the results and to focus more on the learning process.
Initially his advice was frustrating because all I wanted was an A in his class, but Mr. Okla was right, my efforts did pay off, but not in the way I thought they would. That experience forced me to start appreciating the learning process as opposed to fixating on my results. I spent so much of the year worrying about my grade that I failed to value my significant growth as a math student. Eventually, when I took Calculus AB, a course I thought I was going to fail, I was surprised that the material was actually making sense. When “successful people encounter small setbacks on the way to achieving success, they learn that sustained effort and perseverance are key ingredients for that success: in other words they develop resilient self-efficacy” (Duckworth & Carlson, 2013). Many individuals assume that they are doomed to perform poorly if they are not some type of genius and therefore resist putting forth any type of effort. They allow past performances in math classes to dictate their future performance. However, my own experience in my classes proved to me that this was not the case. Thus, when I first started teaching, I told my students that the first step to becoming a “good” math student was to challenge themselves to spend less time thinking about the results and to focus more on the learning process.