Students are Not Responsible for Adult Urgency

I began my career in education in 2010 at age 28. If you had asked me in high school what I wanted to be, you would have heard pediatric neurologist, and while I do not perform medically necessary surgery, I still spend my days paying attention to how stress and confidence show up in math educators long before anyone says a word and I perform "math surgery" every day with teachers and students.

I started ninth grade at THE Michael E. DeBakey High School for Health Professions in 1996 and I got humbled fast. Up to that point, school felt easy enough that I did not have to build the kind of academic muscle you need when the room gets competitive. Then I walked into chemistry with Dr. Srinivasan, a woman with a doctorate in chemistry, and stoichiometry taught me a lesson I still remember at 43 years of age. I earned my first C ever and I was devastated, not because one grade ruined my life, but because it cracked something in me that I did not know was fragile. I pushed and finished the year with a B, but the anxiety stayed, and by tenth grade my confidence had dropped in a way I could not explain at the time. I left DeBakey after that year and went to my neighborhood school, and things stabilized, but I never forgot how quickly pressure turned into doubt.

That is why January always gets my attention. Every.👏🏾 Single.👏🏾 Year. 👏🏾

It's testing season. You have semester one data, you have middle of year numbers, and the pressure from the top starts sounding like urgency, even when the adults mean well. Your teachers feel it first, then they walk into classrooms carrying it in their tone, their pacing, and the way instruction shifts into a constant reminder of what students do not know yet. Kids pick up on all of it, and once anxiety sits down in the room, learning gets harder for everybody.

If you have not held steady data conversations since September, starting them now feels like panic, and panic spreads. Check out Dr. Monea Beane on LinkedIn if you need guidance. If you have not built a routine for how you respond to results, launching one in January turns data into a weapon instead of a tool, and it teaches students that school equals pressure. This season does not give us permission to place OUR adult stress on children.

So you got data, and now what? Build a plan for remediation of older standards and build a plan for intervention for what students face next, but keep the plan grounded and predictable so it supports confidence instead of creating fear. Then lead like support means something. Ask your teachers what they need and listen, jump in and pull a small group, cover a class so a teacher breathes, sit beside them and map the next two weeks with clear targets and simple checks for understanding. When you walk into classrooms, leave the title at the door because your teachers do not need more pressure in January or February and definitely not in March. Teachers need us to carry weight so they don't hand it to kids, and so they still feel like staying through the 2027 school year.

Shot put to those who know what Stoichiometry is!