Why do I need to learn this..... I am never going to use it!

I am going to guess that many of you have either said or heard those words.  I remember saying them myself in school.  For years I would try to make sure that my math lessons were relevant to the students' lives and although I was often successful I still heard these words.  I have also heard students say they didn't need to learn what I was teaching because  their mom, their wife or they just planned on hiring someone to do their bills or another life skills or math lesson I was teaching. Since then I have one answer.  Don't you want to grow dendrites?  That answer seems to actually motivate them to learn and try harder.  When new students as why they have to learn something, the other students fill him or her in on dendrites for me.

Neuron

Dendrites grow in your brain, the more you use your brain the more dendrites and the stronger dendrites you will grow. Even though it has been argued that worksheets definitely aren't the best way to grow dendrites, when I see someone cheating, or copying another students answers instead of struggling a bit and figuring it out on his own.  I tell the student that the person he or she is copying from won't be around to solve his problems forever, I then ask them don't you want to grow your own dendrites so you can problem solve for yourself?

Who wants to play chess?

Even though you may not use the math you are specifically studying, don't you want your brain to have lots of these great problem solving dendrites?  Now as a parent you might think this is all school related.  You can do puzzles, play chess or even have your child figure out how to increase a recipe she is cooking are all ways that you can all help your child grow dendrites.  Don't worry about your child making a mistake or having to start over, this is part of the learning process.  Figuring out how to fix a mistake challenges the brain. Challenging the brain is what learning is all about. Let you students and own children know that making mistakes is all about learning, nothing to get upset about.  We know when a person is upset their brain actually has trouble connecting all the pieces due to being stressed out.  When students feel confident and don't worry about making a mistake it helps learning be at its best.

There has been talk about the brain having plasticity.  This basically means that your brain can grow and change all your life.  Carol Dweck has coined the term "growth mindset".  where a person can continue to learn, their brain will continue to get smarter.  In 2013 I took  Jo Boaler's online class at Stanford University, "How to Learn Math".  Jo Boaler recently co-founded  the website  www.youcubed.org  One of the things Jo talked about was students learning from their mistakes and not being afraid to make mistakes. Although I had already been doing this a bit, I took it a step further from what I learned in her class.  One way was when we worked out a difficult problem I would call on several students to tell me what answer they got and how they got it.  As I went from person to person I didn't say who was correct or who was incorrect.  Students listened to each other, figured out how they went wrong or why several people might be correct and how different students arrived at the same answer using a different technique.  Other times I would have students document words, pictures and symbols on paper and take turns going up to the Elmo and showing the class what they got for the answer and how they solved it.  Students loved the fact of self-discovery teaching them another way to do a problem, or figuring out where they missed a step.  

I recently found online that Jo Boaler has developed a reference card that gives you great ways to encourage mindset growth when you are teaching or with your child.  Mindset Cards

One of the lesson Jo Boaler showed a video on when I took her class was students telling how many squares around a numbers chart (like the picture frame on the outer number boxes).  So how many squares are around a 10x10 hundreds chart?  A 8 x 8 chart? This is a great activity.  How many of you said 40 squares? 38 squares? 36 squares?  I get all those answers, we then discuss and go on and do a few more squares.  When we do our final discussion, students have come up with different formulas to figure out how to be correct each time without having to count all the squares.