Friday, August 9, 2013

To My Students

We do mistakes.

"Ms. Lindstrom.... Huh? This is a math classroom. There's a right and wrong answer and you can only write in pencil and you must grade in red pen. That's how a math classroom works."

I spend the first week of class trying to lay a foundation in my classroom that we do mistakes. We fail. We are not correct all the time. We don't erase our work, because its our thought process; our guide to the answer, even if we got it wrong the first couple of times.  

You can write in pen, but don't you scribble your mistakes out! I want to see them! 

The book Mindset is going to help me foster more of this rationale in my classroom. It's going to change my language and its going to help me show my students that it is ok to make mistakes. I will instill in them it's what they do with those mistakes that is important to their learning. They will learn by correcting mistakes that they have made. They will challenge themselves by pushing their limits. They will not be satisfied with an easy problem. By instilling these traits in my students, the book will not only be changing my mindset, but changing the mind sets of my 100 students as well. 

To my students I say (to quote Ron Washington), "That's how [math] go." 


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