Uncomfortably Comfortable With One Way

The math world really messed up when someone taught me how to create an interactive notebook.

For years, interactive notebooks became my go to for teaching math. Whether I was teaching sixth, seventh, or eighth grade, I fell in love with foldables. Every year, I grabbed my notebook from the year before and made a new one almost identical to it. Same foldables, same approach, maybe one or two new ones here and there.

But I was comfortable.

I knew how to deliver the math because I had done it year after year. I had become really good at teaching it one way, and because I knew what I was doing, I felt confident. There wasn’t much reason for me to question my approach.

Then came HQIM.

My initial response was similar to what I’ve heard from many educators. “It’s not aligned.” “I don’t like it.” “My kids can’t…” You fill in the blank.

Looking back, those reactions had more to do with how uncomfortable I was learning something new than with the mathematics itself. HQIM challenged me to move beyond the approaches I had relied on for years. I was used to deciding how I would teach the mathematics, and suddenly I was looking at lessons that approached it differently.

When I finally sat down and worked through the curriculum for myself, I began to appreciate how much I was stretching myself to explore mathematical approaches I hadn’t considered before.

In my current role developing curriculum, I sit in a room full of math educators and get to see how their mathematical thinking translates into a lesson. Sometimes I immediately connect with their approach, and other times I ask them to explain their thinking. Sometimes it’s simply my first time seeing the mathematics approached that way, and I genuinely want to understand it.

I wonder how often we, as math educators, become so comfortable with what we know that we stop giving ourselves opportunities to learn something different. We’ve done it for years, gotten good at it, and don’t necessarily feel the need to question it.

A few months ago, I wrote about how the things we say our students can’t do sometimes reveal more about our own fears than their abilities. I wonder how often we place similar limitations on ourselves without realizing it.

How many opportunities have I missed to deepen my own understanding because I was confident in what I already knew?

There’s nothing wrong with being confident in an approach we’ve mastered. I knew how to teach the mathematics the way I had learned to teach it. But being good at something doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to learn.

Seventeen years into this work, I’m still learning, still asking questions, and still finding new ways to understand mathematics.