At HMH, we strive to not only create math instruction that connects to student interests, encourages multiple solutions, and normalizes mistakes, but also speak with educators who share these philosophies. Here, math teacher Russell Hanes explains how he works to ensure that all students learn to think mathematically.
Welcome back to Teachers in America, where we connect with real educators and ed leaders to provide practical instructional tips and talk about the latest teaching trends to help you stay on the forefront of what’s new in education.
Today, we are joined by Russell Hanes, a middle and high school math teacher in Portland, Oregon. Russell has been teaching for two decades in public and private schools in the U.S. and abroad. He holds a B.A. in mathematics from Columbia University in New York. Throughout his career, he's taught every math subject from fractions in 6th grade to A.P. Statistics in high school. Most recently, he authored the book Arguing with Data, which details how to approach introductory statistics. In today's episode, Russell gives insight on how to build students' confidence in math by embracing mistakes and shifting their mindset to see themselves as "math people."
A conversation with educator Russell Hanes
A full transcript of the episode appears below; it has been edited for clarity.
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Jenn Corujo: From paper and pencil to WIFI and AI, education is ever evolving. On this new season of Teachers in America, we’ll keep you on the forefront of what’s new. We connect with teachers and ed leaders to talk trending topics and real issues, bringing you inspiring ideas that will influence the future of your teaching.
Earlier this year, host Kailey Rhodes connected with her former colleague: math teacher Russell Hanes. Russell has been teaching for two decades in public and private schools in the U.S. and abroad. Throughout his career, he has taught public speaking, debate, civics, and every math subject from fractions in 6th grade to A.P. Statistics in high school.
Today, Russell and Kailey discuss how to help students step out of their math comfort zone and see themselves as “math people.” Plus, Russell shares teaching strategies to use in the math classroom, like helping students embrace and learn from their math mistakes.
Now here's Russell and Kailey!
Kailey Rhodes: Russell, welcome. I’m so glad that you’re here. How are you?
Russell Hanes: Very good. Very good. Thank you so much for having me, Kailey.
This is really awesome. I love that you’re doing the podcasting thing now. This is such awesome stuff.
Kailey: It’s a perfect fit, right? I like to talk and you’re like, I have to go teach.
Russell: Yes. Well, I love that I got a random text that was like, “Do you want to be on the podcast?” And I was like, that can only be one person.
Kailey: Yeah. But then you, in true Russell form, had to “don’t trust: verify”. You sent me an email. Well, in today’s episode, we were planning on talking about how to get students from their very understandable math trauma into their math comfort zone, helping even teachers step more into that math comfort zone. And there’s no better person to talk to about that than you, because you have been so formative in my journey as seeing myself as a math person, because I didn’t start as a math teacher. I started in the English classroom, and you were my first mentor as I became a math teacher.
Actually, one of the first conversations you and I had was about “not a math person”. That was one of the first things when we were in your office. So, how do you respond? Let’s just start with a student, because everyone says it, right? But how do you respond when a student says, I’m not a math person?
Russell: I mean, I think there’s like sort of two flavors that you can get, right? One is the student is saying, “It’s just not really my interest. It’s not something I’m super passionate about.” And then you get the students who are saying that because they’ve been super traumatized by math, right? This is a true story. One time I was getting my hair cut and the lady said, “What do you do for a job?” And I said, math teacher. She hissed and jumped back. This is how traumatized some people are about math. So, I think the first thing that you have to do is figure out why the student is saying that.
Are they telling you they are afraid of math? Or are they telling you that it’s just not their thing? If they’re telling you that it’s not their thing, you want to connect them to all of the amazing things that you can do with math, all of the interesting properties that they can learn about, connected to their interests. They’re interested in science. Great. They’re interested in art. Great. Let’s find the connections to math that they would find really interesting. That’s maybe just the function of they haven’t had a teacher really look for projects and applications that they find. But as you all know, right from teaching sixth graders who many of them came into your classroom really traumatized and upset. You have to figure out what is going on and sort of help them start to unpack it. And that’s a whole different ball of wax.
Kailey: Right. For context, I have our group of sixth-grade students who need the most math support.
I think that what shocked me, because I’m gonna say it, I’m not a math person. And I’m not supposed to say that! But I’m not a math person. What I mean when I say that, is math does not come by osmosis for me. I can’t just watch a teacher do it, and see it, and just go replicate it, or even be like, what about this and get up there and ba doop boop boop, like a jazz riff on whatever I just saw.
I need a lot more questions answered before I’m ready to really understand this. But I think that that’s normal. What I saw in school was just prodigies. It felt like prodigies and plebeians, and I was definitely a plebe. That equaled, if you’re not a genius, ergo, you are not a math person.
That’s what it felt like. And now I tell my students, that I said that too. You and I have to reclaim our speed. Cause speed’s a big trigger in math. We have to reclaim our speed. This is something that I actually really love about the Common Core is it mandates that we have different ways of instruction, instructing the same concept. And I feel like that really honors what I needed. What has also surprised me is that a lot of kids come into my class with the lowest math current application ability. And they say they love math.
Russell: I think it’s a testament to your skills connecting with students.
I think what you’re also saying is really important, too, about the curriculum. The way that we have taught math, where you’re trying to go at the fastest possible speed, does not work for a lot of kids. It doesn’t particularly work for me either. I don’t find it really pleasurable to sit down and take a timed math test.
The ways that we have set up instruction where we’re trying to get students to replicate down a very specific narrow pathway is not going to work really well for lots of students. And if you have a broader, more open pathway, that’s good for a lot of kids. That’s good for more kids. I think a lot of the problem is that the way that we’ve taught creates a really stressful environment for kids. If we use timed tests, I don’t particularly enjoy that. It’s stressful. I recently have had to take a class where there were timed tests. I didn’t enjoy it. It’s trying to recall stuff as quickly as possible, which doesn’t work for every moment for every learner. And the way that we’ve done instruction, too, in the past, has sort of limited the number of pathways that students can go down.
We show them one pathway. We’re like, here’s how to get to the answer, and we sort of expect students to be able to follow along that pathway and replicate it. Whereas a better, I think, way of instruction is to let students see that there are actually multiple pathways that get them to the correct answer, and to honor different sorts of solutions, honor different ways of thinking about it, really honor that students have done a lot of the thinking. It just might not look exactly perfectly crystallized math, right? But it’s still mathematical thinking. We kind of fetishize an outcome. Like students are supposed to write proofs or something when they’re still learning material, which doesn’t make any sense.
Kailey: Which is why in your class you do a ton of group work where maybe the mathematical thinking is crowdsourced, and then maybe you’ve got the student that can kind of push it through to that distillation.
Russell: Right. And I think part of it is just not trying to rush the students to that point. Part of it is that we want to have the students get to this distilled, crystallized result in three weeks or four weeks or whenever we’re wrapping up the unit. And we all know that that’s setting a timetable that might not be realistic for certain kids. And it would be better to just sort of acknowledge your understanding of this is still a work in progress. You’re not at the most crystallized form, but you still understand the core concept. Recognizing that kids can still be in process at the end of the unit.
Kailey: Yeah, which makes grading really complicated.
Russell: Oh, it’s a mess, right?
Kailey: Well, because if we’re really alive to this idea of growth. It’s not about achievement. It’s about growth. And if we’re really, therefore, nuanced about, you have to understand each kid’s kind of brain, not just what’s on the paper, but what you know is going on back there.
And that does make giving a score or a letter to that really, really tricky. I know that you and I could talk about grading all day, so what I want to do is press pause. That moment that a student says, “I’m not a math person”. You said just kind of suss out what are they telling you. Are they telling you that they would rather be in art or are they telling you that they have trauma or both? And then making sure that . . . I’ve heard a lot of speed. We’ve both been talking just a lot about speed and we’ve also both been talking a lot about like externalizing this very conversation that we’re having right now and kind of almost doing it in front of the kids.
Russell: I think recognizing, talking to kids and saying, “You know, if you have been traumatized in a previous class, I’m really sorry that that happened. I don’t think that that was right. Let’s sit down and actually figure out what you really know. Let’s figure out what you really can do without all of the stress.” I’ve seen people working with students who really just add to their stress and I’ve seen people who take their stress.
And I think the whole thing that I would argue is that we need to, as teachers, find ways to help take the stress off, because then you’re going to get a more accurate read of what the student really knows, and what they actually really feel. I mean, math doesn’t have to be everybody’s favorite subject. And that’s okay, you know? But they can all do it. We should figure out what they are actually capable of doing.
Kailey: Right. We have a math Pledge of Allegiance in my class. The last line of it is just, I will go at my own pace and I will endeavor to see the beauty of math around me. Because even if you are not trying to go further with your math studies, which we’re going to talk about in a second, you can at least appreciate that math is probably, as you said earlier, they’re interested in science. Math’s everywhere in science, you know.
If they’re interested in anime, math is all over anime. It’s everywhere, so let’s embrace it. When we picture this math classroom that you and I are trying to maybe move away from, a lot of people, the image that pops into their minds, and they might even still be educators, but the image that pops into their minds is like a lot of bent heads over paper and pencil, doing these kind of repetitive tasks to get the algorithm down.
But teaching math, I was surprised coming from the speech and rhetoric world, which you also occupy as a debate teacher, but coming from an English teacher, we talk so much in math. Math is so much discussion and argument. How has your experience as a debate teacher shaped the way that you are able to hold space and facilitate that math discourse?
Russell: Well, I think a big part of what we need to do as math educators is actually thinking about entertaining hypotheticals. Timmy might not have the correct answer, but has made an interesting mistake. And we need to walk through that mistake and see where they slipped up and if other students made that mistake.
And to understand why it’s wrong and to understand how to correct it. That isn’t to say that . . . there is absolutely a place in math for correcting students and saying what’s right and what’s wrong. There’s absolutely a necessity for doing that, unless you are intentionally leaving them with a cliffhanger. But I think that we should be able to entertain hypotheticals and play ask students to explain their reasoning. What’s your argument for why this is true? Walk us through the logic. That’s the key part that holds that math has to hang together by logic. If the students can’t explain the thinking that got the answer, it doesn’t matter whether the answer is right or wrong.
Kailey: It’s kind of like when you’re assigned a side in debate that you don’t necessarily personally agree with, and you still have to mine it for what’s there. And there’s definitely something there.
My favorite thing to do is, if a student has made an interesting mistake, say on the board number four, everybody take a look at number four, and I’ve privately checked in with number four beforehand and been like, “Hey, you have a really cool mistake. Don’t erase it. It’s about to become the backbone of our lesson.”
But one of my favorite things to do is like mute that kid. They can’t defend, and they’re not being defensive. They literally are defending their math. But muting them and making the rest of the class try to explain what they thought happened not only enlivens the rest of the class, but like makes that one kid go insane. And you’re like, I never thought I would see you writhe from wanting to talk about math. You’re welcome. You’re a math person.
Russell: Exactly. No, I think you’re absolutely right. The issue is you sometimes have to step into other people’s shoes and walk through the logic that they did.
Even when you can see that there’s a mistake, you have to be able to articulate it. I do think the problems that are being included more in curricula, where it’s like, here’s what two students thought. Explain what their reasoning is. Explain where they went wrong. I think that’s a really good exercise for students to see mistakes and see mistakes as normal.
Kailey: Yes.
Russell: That’s a big part of . . . we have to normalize mistakes, we have to normalize disagreement. That’s a big part too, that the students look up to the teacher and think that the teacher never makes mistakes. That’s just not a good rhetorical stance to have as a teacher.
Kailey: Right. No. It also makes you as a teacher feel . . . so I as a math teacher felt the same amount of pressure that I felt as an English teacher to answer everyone’s grammatical question and I’m supposed to be able to spell every word that ever worded. So now, I’m responsible for calculating everyone’s taxes because I’m a math teacher.
Russell: That’s terrible! I think as math teachers, we should feel comfortable with ambiguity. We should model that for our students. I think it’s perfectly okay to say “That’s a really interesting question.”
Kailey: You’ve said that to me! I don’t know if you remember this, but a couple years ago, I couldn’t figure something out, and you were next to me teaching. And I came over and interrupted you, and was like, I have a problem I don’t know. Will you help me? I’ve done it to Chris too, another colleague of ours. I was just like, I want them to watch two adults who are curious about a math problem and maybe they can’t solve it. That is math in progress. A lot of the math that we’re teaching is discovered math. Kind of like science. A lot of the science we’re teaching is established science. But when you watch mathematicians math, or when you watch scientists science, it’s because there’s a question mark.
Russell: Absolutely. And it doesn’t have to be something that’s at the forefront of the limits of our research with math in order to be a valid question. Right?
Kailey: Right. It’s literally how much more parking do I need to put in my meter.
If this is what they charge, and Russell, can your phone reach my parking? Here’s my phone. Go pay my parking. But everything you’re saying, like I was about to say, I’m ashamed to admit it, but that’s silly. I’m excited to discover that there’s so many parallels between what you do as a math teacher and what you do as a debate teacher.
Russell: I think the main parallels are being comfortable with ambiguity, being comfortable with disagreement, expecting that there is a process of discussion. And that maybe no one has the answer per se, or we’re going to figure out the answer together as a result of doing this process. I always tell my students in debate that I have had students actually change my mind on an issue. It’s not really important what my position is in a debate class. What is important is that you can actually justify and back up your own answer, right? That you can use research and explain your own reasoning. That’s the important bit. And I think that’s the same exact same thing in math, right? You should be comfortable with ambiguity. The teacher doesn’t have to be the final authority on every question.
Kailey: Okay, speaking of debate, there seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to math facts. A lot of people are still in this camp of, we need to memorize them. And I’m saying a lot of people are still in this camp because I, on every other day, am in this camp of we need to memorize math facts. And then others say to focus on the problem solving and the math facts will come. If a student just knows 7 times 8, it doesn’t necessarily tell us if they understand why. But, what’s your perspective on how students should build fluency with those math facts?
Russell: So, I think in this case, both of the extremes are sort of caricatures that I think are not best practices for helping kids.
Kailey: I’m sorry. What word did you just say?
Russell: Caricatures.
Kailey: Oh my gosh! Where are you from, from?
Russell: Did I say it wrong?
Kailey: No, I say it wrong. I say caricatures. Can we write a song called Caricatures? Caricatures?
Russell: I think they wrote one. Uh, you say tomato, I say potahto.
Kailey: Okay, that’s just the unknown verse. That’s the deep cut. Okay, sorry. So, yeah, both extremes, not good. Don’t make students . . . rap them on the knuckles until they know all their multiplication tables. But also, we need some kind of commitment to memory.
Russell: Yeah, I mean, we know that being unable to draw from facts is going to hinder kids who are not able to see a pathway through a problem. So, just to give an example, I had a student in a pre-algebra class who was still counting on their fingers. Perfectly understood all the linear equations that we were doing, but every time this kid had to sit down and simplify fractions, they were counting on their fingers. In eighth grade. And you could say, well, you could pull out a calculator, but the kid who’s able to look at a fraction and say, “Oh, six sixteenths. I know that six is twice the three. I know sixteen is twice of eight” is going to be able to simplify it much faster. They’re going to be able to make insights and just not have the cognitive load. This kid took an hour to answer a question on a test because they were doing everything on their hands.
Kailey: Even though they’re ready. They’re ready. They get it.
Russell: Oh, yeah. The abstract reasoning that we were doing with linear equations. This kid understood. But their cognitive load was super high.
Kailey: And the way that I understand cognitive load . . . you taught me that term.
Because I was coming to you and being like, “Their gears are too frictious in their head and they get fatigued.” And you’re like, “Yes, there’s a word for that.”
Russell: That’s exactly what it is. You can only juggle so many balls in working memory and you need to be able to chunk things in working memory so that you can get to the bigger stuff.
If you’re constantly managing small chunks of information because you haven’t memorized something, then it’s certainly going to slow you down and impair you when all these chunks need to be kept in mind at once.
Kailey: I think that’s the best argument. It’s not about turning our kids into a militant memorization thing.
It’s about smoothing the gears for later when they are like ready to fly and the stupid small stuff isn’t gumming up their wings.
Russell: Exactly. It’s ice on the wings, right? It’s just holding you down. But by the same token, there’s good memorization and bad memorization. They can just sit there and memorize their times tables just completely rotely.
You know, 7 x 9 = 63. Or they could actually memorize where they’re looking for patterns. Oh, 7 times 9, well, I also know 7 times 10 is 70. So, 7 times 9 must be less than 70, right? How much less? Well, it’s one seven less. So that’s 63. If they’re building complex, interconnected memories, then the chances that you can go and recall something when you need it just becomes exponentially higher. If you just memorize something as a disconnected, isolated fact, your recall of it is gonna also be kind of poor. You’re gonna have to land the one pathway to recall that memory. But if you’re building an interconnected set of memories . . .
Kailey: . . . then you’re cultivating flexible, agile, a playground of math in your head rather than, one slide, one slide, one slide.
Russell: Exactly. It’s not just about cramming the stuff in and somehow recall happens magically. You want recall to be almost so . . . You want to have created so many pathways that it’s almost hard not to recall. That they almost would have to intentionally not wander across a pathway and recall.
Kailey: One of my classroom tricks is that I buy a ball and I write multiplication problems all over it, and we throw it around and wherever your right thumb lands, you have to answer that math problem. You don’t have to play. You can sit down. You can say pass. There’s a lot of safety nets because I know that . . . that’s some people’s hell, right? I have to catch and then do math. I have a couple of things in place for my high flyers too. When they catch a ball and they say a math fact really fast, like seven times nine, 63 and they rear back to throw the ball to someone else.
And I’m like, Wait! Can you tell me why? Can you just walk me through? And they’ll do your 70 one: 7 times 10 minus 7, and I’ll be like, can you do it any other way, a different way? And then they start getting playful with 21. Asking students to lubricate their gears, externally and in front of other kids. Throwing a new pathway to even the high flyer is essential to showing kids why it’s not good enough to just know it’s 63. That’s not the end goal. That kid that would have intimidated middle school Kailey Rhodes actually wasn’t maybe as fluent as I thought.
Russell: No, I totally agree.
I think that’s an excellent activity, and it’s a really clear indication that the stuffing memories in is not the end goal.
Kailey: We’re not Build-a-Bear.
Russell: Right, right. The goal is not to have all of these facts. It’s to have useful facts and connections and see the connections so that we can think flexibly.
It’s building muscles. You play scales so that you can then play things that are not scales. But you need to know where your fingers need to go on the keyboard so that you can do the scale correctly, so then you can start jumping.
Kailey: Yeah, and the more in your body the scale is, the less friction you’re gonna have as you fly higher, as you start composing. This kind of roteness versus rhythm is something that we see a lot in curriculum—old curriculum, new curriculum—because a lot of teachers swear by practice sets where students work on the same skill over and over again. Just like get it in your body, get it in your body, which I understand.
There’s also another school of thought where we’re looking at these open-ended, rich, long math tasks that take whole class periods or longer. How do we strike a balance there, and what does a good math task look like in your opinion?
Russell: I think with open-ended tasks, the same thing is true: that there can be good open-ended tasks and bad open-ended tasks.
If you threw a problem at students, and basically said, “Here, you learn derivatives on your own. You need them to be able to answer this question, but I’m not going to teach you.” I mean, that’s just too much, right? It’s not scaffolded for the students.
Kailey: It’s a bad escape room.
Russell: Yes, exactly. What you really need is an open-ended task where they’re bringing a motivation on their own. They’re interested in the subject matter. Maybe it’s the kid who’s passionate about art getting to connect. But where you’ve scaffolded the math task for them. I think the question of what defines a good activity versus a bad activity across the board is. . .
Number 1, is it something that’s in the appropriate zone for the kids? Is it something that they’re actually able to understand and to do productively? Is it something where they will be able to make rich connections and think deeply about the problem? And have you set them up in a way where the clear onus of thinking is on them? And there’s a whole gamut of activities from fun games, memorizing, to doing open-ended projects, to doing group work. All of those can meet those criteria if you just are being really thoughtful about what my purpose is as a teacher. What is my pedagogical purpose? What do I want the students to accomplish here? So, I think all of those can be set up as good tasks.
Kailey: Something I know about me being a math teacher is inventing math problems is hard. Inventing whole-class, rich, task, perfect zone of proximal development, perfectly differentiated, that is really tricky.
And, so, I look to resources, right? I look to 3 Act Math. I look to other sources. What are some favorite, ”Hey, if you are ready to engage your kids in some rich, whole-class tasks, and your curriculum isn’t maybe meeting that need,” where would you direct one of your teachers, a.k.a. me?
Russell: I think a lot of the things that we need to do are pulling from those resources, just like you mentioned: from textbooks, from other resources that you have, from websites. But I think the key thing is you as a teacher, having the confidence to improvise and to adapt, right?
The saying is no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, and I think no lesson plan survives the first five minutes of class. As soon as the students see the problem, you might as well just throw your lesson plan away. Because it’s not going to go to plan. And I think the difference between an experienced teacher who’s really focused on the goals is that they know how to adapt and respond.
They recognize where the students are struggling, where there’s room for growth. So, I don’t think you have to come up with, here’s the perfect lesson plan. I have defined this. I have pulled it out of the heavens, and I’ve put it into paper form. And it’s going to amaze the students and wow my administrators.
Kailey: It’s going to tap dance across the desk.
Russell: Exactly, right? That’s not the goal. The goal is to say, what do we need to do today? We need to talk about writing your equation. Let me pull some lesson plans that I can find online and in other textbooks. Where are my students going to struggle? And even just doing that pre-thinking makes a huge difference.
And then as soon as you get in the classroom, taking the opportunities and looking for the students who’ve made interesting mistakes. Looking for the one-offs that just happen that one day and they don’t happen again.
Kailey: So, deviating from your script, making sure that you walk in with a rich thing that you’ve thought about, but if your goal is to watch them ignite with thinking and interacting with the problem, then they have about a hundred different ways they can do that and you just need to follow them where they go.
Russell: Yeah, I was just gonna say, if your goal is to get the students to think, how would you do that by yourself shutting down in the classroom?
Kailey: What’s your goal? To get them to think. What does that look like?
You have to get really honest with that. Because I get in there and I’m like, “Well, we haven’t gotten to number three, which is when I show you this graph.” And you are like, “No, we never got to number three because at number one there was enough for them to be thinking and that was my goal.” But it is like letting go. So much of teaching is letting go.
Russell: You’ve heard the expression in editing that you have to murder your darling?
Kailey: Yes!
Russell: That’s the fundamental rule of teaching, I think, too. It’s like, but number three is so exciting to me!
Kailey: I photocopied it front and back in the color printer and it was all across campus. Who am I making fun of? Me! Okay, so what you’re recalling for me from the top of our conversation is this idea that being honest about what thinking looks like. And so even if you have a kid that knows all the math facts, is there thinking?
Even if you have a kid that’s still counting on the fingers, is there thinking? And so just coming back to this whole idea of not a math person, one of the things that I get in my classroom are brand new little sixth graders who are not used to not walking out of the classroom with an answer, or knowing they did it wrong, or, well, this was your mistake—okay, bye, see you tomorrow.
And they get very frustrated by that. A lot of people’s frustration with math actually can lie in that open-ended stuff because they are like, just tell me the answer, just tell me how to do it. And I think that norming from day one that part of undoing your math trauma is getting more comfortable with that ambiguity. I mean all this is clicking for me. You already said this. You’re nodding. You’re like, yes I’ve been saying this the whole time and this is very true for us. This tracks. But it’s all coalescing for me where I’m like, “Oh, that’s what you meant by ambiguity” and that is probably the most uncomfortable part not only for us, but definitely for them.
Russell: Yeah. No other subject, I think, in middle school or high school puts kids on the spot as much. At least in your science class, there’s a body of facts that you can sort of memorize, and the same thing in your history class. Even if your thinking has not really developed in that subject, you can still get something down and get right for something. And it feels like, in math, everybody is expecting that there’s just the right answer there. It doesn’t matter what the thinking is, and I think we just have to get students a lot more comfortable with . . . Sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes the problem is outside of your ability to solve it, and that’s okay. And maybe we don’t get an answer that day, but maybe we come back to it later in the semester and we do.
Kailey: The presence of or absence of an answer is not the presence or absence of success. We have to break that. And I think that’s a myth that a lot of kids walk in with and that’s why they feel like a failure. It’s because they’re like, I didn’t get the right answer. I’m a failure. But if we transform, if we alchemize that into, you came in here today, you were on your feet, you were engaged, you were thinking, you were making mistakes left and right because you were trying, you tried so much, therefore you failed some—and that is success in math class.
Well, I want to end on one last little question. Why are you so obsessed with statistics? Mr. “I’m writing a textbook on statistics”. What a nerd! Walk us through your love affair. And you have to keep it short. I know, I know this is like its own podcast: Episode One of multi-season Russell’s obsession with statistics.
Russell: I think that there are two main reasons. The first is what other class has a greater claim to actually being useful in your adult life as a citizen. Kids coming out of high school should understand how polling and surveys work. They should understand how research studies are done. They should understand how experiments are done.
Do we think that, if people were more statistically literate, that the pandemic would have unfolded the same way that it did? I don’t. I think if people were actually statistically literate, I think they would have understood more and behaved differently.
Kailey: And also questioned, demanded good data. Noticed flaws in the way that things are conducted sometimes, or sample sizes, or things like that. Look at me trying to act like I know any of this vocabulary. I don’t. I’m so sorry, Russell.
Russell: No, no, the sample size is the most important thing.
Kailey: Oh my God! I know! See? I know!
Russell: There you go. There you go. You’re right.
Kailey: Chapter One of your textbook. I’ll write the foreword. You don’t even have to ask.
Russell: Thank you. I appreciate that. I can’t think of anything that’s more important for students to understand graduating high school, right?
Kailey: And you know, you’re making me think, speaking of real-world fodder for your whole class, you just must open the newspaper every day and be like, this is today’s lesson.
Russell: I mean, we do this with some regularity, where I’m like, “Alright, today’s lesson: I’ve brought in this survey that’s just been done. And we’re going to talk about what went right, what went wrong. Why they got the results”. And then I think the second reason that’s super important for studying statistics is there are so many jobs where people encounter data. And it is so, so easy to open up Excel and put numbers in a spreadsheet, and have the spreadsheet do stuff. And everything that you do not see about how the data was collected is actually super, super important. And if you don’t know something, you are so likely to be misled by data that looks like it supports your conclusion and actually doesn’t. I have a true story that I was at a school, and the head of school made this announcement. And shared this data with all of the faculty.
Kailey: What did you do?
Russell: The three statistics teachers, we all just sort of heard this, and we all go . . .
Kailey: Oh, no, not the head tilt. Oh, no!
Russell: Because we all immediately knew what the flaw was.
Kailey: Do you remember what it was?
Russell: It was basically, like I said, the data that you don’t see is often what gets you. So when you’re saying, “Oh, we’ve seen this sample increase, we’ve seen this population increase its average over time”, the question is why is it increasing over time? Is it because the population is changing? And that was exactly what was happening. It didn’t actually indicate anything good. What’s happening? It just indicated that the population was changing.
Kailey: Man, data is, you’re right, it’s everything. Coming from NWEA perspective of needing those MAP Growth scores to just . . . you have to have data to know where you’ve come from and where you’re going. And you have to have data that’s, we say, trustworthy data, and this is what this is. It’s data that we’re trusting is not being cherry picked to tell a certain narrative or left out a very big consideration or, or a big skew. Again, the incredible researchers are probably like, stop. Stop trying to use vocabulary. But you’re right. And this idea of, if we truly want to educate critical, critical consumer kids, critical kids. Where is statistics? You’re right. Well, when am I going to be able to take your textbook and read it before I go to bed every night?
Russell: It’s definitely bedtime reading. It will put you to sleep. No, I hope not. I’m a couple months away from finishing it, but things keep happening. Life is busy, so it’ll probably be another ten years. Hopefully soon.
Kailey: That is so exciting, Russell, that you are . . . I feel so lucky to know someone as mathy as you, because you, you do a great job of . . . your math prowess never makes me feel inadequate, and, therefore, you do the opposite. You amplify my mathiness, you make me feel proud of my own math speed and math journey, and so you being my math department head when I came on, and now being my math colleague. . .
I just really, really feel grateful. So, thank you so much for coming on and talking about all of this cool stuff today.
Russell: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I really love the journey that you’ve been on. It’s amazing to see someone start out and say, I’m not a math person, and then do the amazing work that you’ve been doing. It’s wonderful to see. So, thank you.
Kailey: Thank you. You know, if you ever want to make me feel amazing, just tell me how the English teacher can become a math teacher and, really, I have a hard time picturing myself going back to teaching not math. There’s just something really beautiful about struggling with it as a student myself and stepping into not only reclaim that, but reclaim it with my kids. That’s really big. And, Russell, thank you so much for joining us today. And listeners, thank you so much for being here.
Jenn: If you or some you know, would like to be a guest on the Teachers in America podcast, please email us at shaped@hmhco.com. Be the first to hear new episodes of Teachers in America by subscribing on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed today’s show, please rate, review, and share it with your network. You can find the transcript of this episode on our Shaped blog by visiting hmhco.com/shaped. The link is in the show notes.
The Teachers in America podcast is a production of HMH. Thank you to the production team of Christine Condon, Tim Lee, Jennifer Corujo, Mio Frye, Thomas Velazquez. and Matt Howell. Thanks again for listening.
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