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“Timed” Math Tests Destroy Kids’ Love Of Math
They cause stress, wreck working memory, and don’t even measure math ability very well
When I was in grade 2 our teacher sent us home with a sheet of math questions.
It quickly turned into a nightmare for me.
The instructions were to do the questions in five minutes. My parents duly set up a timer for me, and I started working on the sheet of problems.
I was a nerdy little kid who liked math, normally. (I’ve grown up into an adult that loves math and does it for pleasure.) But back in grade 2, knowing that the timer was ticking, I suddenly found myself frozen. I looked at the figures and nothing computed. It was math that I normally could easily calculate, but suddenly, nothing would cohere in my brain.
It felt terrible. After a couple of minutes, I’d barely answered a question or two, and I was realizing I’ll never get this done in time.
And realizing that made me even more nervous. Pretty soon I couldn’t focus at all, on anything. By the time the timer went off, I was weeping miserably.
I felt like an absolute failure. The sense of shame was hot and terrible; it was burned into my memory so deeply I can still summon it today!
Thankfully my parents realized the whole thing had gone awry, and reassured me that it likely didn’t matter at all whether I did the sheet in five minutes. So after I calmed down a bit I did the math without a timer, and, without any clock ticking, I did it just fine.
But I still felt like crap, because I wanted to please my teacher, and I hadn’t been able to do what she’d asked.
I tell this story because last month I wrote a piece about why so many Americans hate math.
It’s nearly always because the educational system in the US teaches math terribly. It endows kids early on with a sense of failure and shame at “not getting it”, and primes them to regard math with anxiety and fear.
But when you read the research into “why we teach math so badly”, one thing stands out as a real problem:
Timed math tests.
