What I hate to hear from Students, Parents and Admin

when I have conversations with people about math or about education and learning math there's a couple of conversations or things that people say that really really really just irk me they rub me wrong and maybe I'm wrong about it but for being a teacher for so many years I have just molded my views on how I view math and education and I think a lot of things that people come into with a conversation is the same old thing again and again so you might agree you might disagree but that's why I wanted to make this video to open up the conversation so let me know in the comments down below I do read all of your comments I'm just not able to respond to all of them but I really really do appreciate your perspective as I look to improve math education now when dealing with students inside the classroom I've had multiple conversations about students in school after school and at parent conferences whenever I hear these words from a student it just gets under my skin and those words are I need this grade it always makes me think why do you need this grade so many students are like I need an a I've had students that have stayed after school they didn't get the grade they wanted maybe it was an a maybe it was a b a c whatever may be the case but they were so bent on getting the grade that they envisioned that they needed to get maybe their parents had pressure for them or it was just something that they're like this is the grade that I deserve and they would pressure me I am not leaving your classroom until you give me this grade I will do anything you want me to do retake all of your assessments but I am not leaving till I get this grade and it was crazy to me because I know grades are important and they were important to me to an extent when I was a student but it seems for a lot of students grades kind of take the holy grail and my problem with this is grades do serve a purpose I like grades I do believe we should have grades but I don't believe grades need to be hold as much weight as they currently do because here's the thing if you get an A like what's the point of having an a if you only have a d worth of knowledge right I mean the thing that I think about is like what is it that you know do you have an a level of knowledge awesome you deserve an a but what can you do for me what is it that you can actually apply the grade needs to be represented of that and if you don't have that knowledge then that grade should not apply now I know there's a lot of things that we can get into about grading policies and grades not being Equitable or Fair I'll have that for you guys in another video but this obsession with having the best grades or having to get this grade no matter what and not even worrying about what you know or what you can do is hurting our educational system and hurting our students so I hate hearing those words I need this grade no no no I want to know what is it you know and what is it you can do let the grade reflect that and it's easy to say that but we all know in reality with college acceptance and scholarships is not as easy to see as it is to do but that comes into our favorite parents and I'm a parent now as well and my children are now going inside the classroom so now I get to sit on the other side and have this conversation about my students progress in math from a parents perspective here's the thing you will never hear me say I am not good at math and therefore or my daughter or my son is not good at math we are not good math people because I absolutely hate hearing those words coming from students and especially from parents it happens all the times in parent teacher conferences the student is struggling or maybe the students is just not getting the grades that they want but they automatically all the time resort to I am not good at math so guess what we are just not math people and I hate that and the reason why is because whenever you utter those words or even think those words you are shutting off your brain giving it hope to keep on working to keep on trying you're giving an excuse to not put in your best effort to understand math the best way I can show how this makes absolutely no sense but as a parent as we all help in our children Lear to walk we are there to encourage them to teach them how to walk and guess what yes what is the Baseline for children to learn how to walk right around 2 years old right right around 2 years old it's not exactly at 2 years old it could be at 20 months it could be at 30 months like there is a range when children are eventually going to learn to walk right they're going to learn to walk they're going to fall down but what are we doing as parents we are encouraging them we are giving them the resources to learn to walk we don't just see them fall and say hey all right you're never going to learn how to walk you're just not a walking type of child no we know that they can learn to walk and we are going to be there to support them and help them and keep on encouraging them every single day to learn how to walk math is learning as well and the hard thing about learning math which I understand we have a fourth quarter right grades are going to be due that is going to be a measurement of how much you understand at that moment in time but just like at 2 years old you're going to turn 2 years old some children already know how to walk very well by 2 years old some children are very much struggling to walk even at 2 years old but again that does not define the child's ability to be able to walk for the rest of your life just like learning math and I know math education has taken a bad rap throughout the years of how we have taught math and how people have learned math but I don't want to hold the history of our educational system with mathematics against our current children they can learn math but they need support high standards and effort to keep on working at it because math is a lifelong journey we can all learn math but we need to have that vision of we can learn math and to put in the work to go ahead and do it I hate that we are not math people we cannot learn math it just gives an excuse for why you cannot be successful in mathematics now in reality I actually hear that a lot not just from parents but from anybody that really just wants to have a conversation you know they ask like hey what do you do for a job and I say hey you know I was a math teacher and usually that's one of the first things that they would always bring up but another thing that people bring up when I tell them that I was a classroom teacher that I teach math and if they're not telling me about some poor story about them learning math they always talk about we need to make math more relatable we need to make math more fun now a lot times when I'm talking with people that maybe are involved in the educational process they are active teachers or administrators or people that are creating educational materials but I fully disagree with that statement because here's a quote from Theodor res that really resonates with me about our understanding and ability to learn math nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort pain and difficulty I've never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life I have envied a great many people who have led difficult lives and led them well now before I start going to look into the comments I am not advocating going back a hundred years in math education to boring lectures working through math textbooks of just these random math problems of doing hundreds of mindless problems in math and having no real connection or no excit M inside the classroom the best teachers are able to bring a classroom and a subject to life so I am not advocating just boring math and going back to the way that math was already done we as traumatized people with learning math they feel like they hate math and math was not for them I don't want to go back to them but I think we've also tilted so far in this other direction where math always has to be relatable always has to be something fun that we've taken a lot of the hard work and the beauty out of mathematics mathematics is hard it is very very complex there is a struggle that you need to go through to be able to fully understand mathematics and I don't want to water down our curriculum just with all this focus of having math always be something enjoyable or relatable because in reality that's not where we're going to get the essence of mathematics out of our students I feel it's a shame that so many students are not going to be able to get the opportunity to explore the Beauty and the advancements of mathematics that believe that math is just a waste of time something they're going to do just for a grade and it's not for them