What do you think of when you hear the word “fun”? Does it involve silly facial expressions? Being with certain people? A particular activity? Games? Math class?

In Dear Math: Why Kids Hate Math and What Teachers Can Do About It, fifteen-year veteran math teacher Sarah Strong and her high school student Gigi Butterfield address concerns about the negative feelings connected to teaching and learning math and why kids hate it (at least some of them) when, yes, it can be fun.

By assigning her students to write a letter to Math, Strong dug into the feelings math evoked in hundreds of middle and high school students—that math is unnecessary, oppressive, and intimidating. (Scroll down to #4 to read one of these letters.)

The student letters speak frequently to a loss of play as they got older. There is a distinct sense that students used to feel they were playing around with numbers and making sense of shapes until a point where the fun and games stopped, and it became hard and confusing. 

Why does the play stop? What takes its place? Are game-based learning platforms like Kahoot the panacea for lack of fun in all math classes? 

Sometimes. But let’s go beyond Kahoot and explore 4 other ideas to make your math class a bit livelier and have students smiling when they come in the room as well as on the way out.

1.        Make Math Memes

Math instructor Howie Hua is unarguably a popular math teacher on X/Twitter with over 87,500 followers. By day, he teaches math to future elementary school teachers. By night, he creates videos and memes that are grounded in mathematics and are sure to get you laughing out loud. His followers often join in the fun and contribute alternate language for the memes or share another meme that they made. 

How can you not like a guy who wears t-shirts in his math videos that say things like, “I will hold a racoon before I die” and “I got skills, they’re multiplying” (nod to John Travolta!). 

So, consider following in Howie’s footsteps and challenge your students to create more fun and joy in math class. 

You can ask your students to create a meme or a joke that represents their learning during your previous unit, such as on logarithms (logs).

Together, look at memes and discuss why they’re funny, how they were constructed, and how they showed a deep understanding of the topic. Co-construct a set of norms for creating a successful meme. Here’s some examples:

• relates to logs in a mathematical way
• makes you laugh a little bit (at least a chuckle)
• artistic in some way (looks nice/professional-ish)
• post it to a math meme account and someone likes it                                                                    

Students then critique each other’s meme or joke, assessing why its construction made sense or was mathematically provocative. Can memes be used in a “gimmick” way? Sure. But can they be used to bring joy and seek deeper learning as well? That’s a definite yes.

2.        Play With Your Math

Joey Kelly and Xi “CiCi” Yu are the curators of a beautiful site called playwithyourmath.com. The introduction to their site invites students to see that the best reason to learn math is “because it’s fun.” They state, “Playing with math can be as rewarding as playing sports, games, or instruments.” 

The exercises on this site are open, provocative, and exploratory. When implemented in a way that centers student ideas and thinking, they’re a lever for fun and intellectual empowerment. And they’re also great to use during that awkward first week of school. Some favorites are the “plus-minus” problem and the “4-4’s.” You’ll be amazed when students dive headfirst into these puzzles and come up with new ways of thinking and exploring that you haven’t seen before.

Bonus: everything on this website is free, downloadable and even available to share on social media! 

Here’s a cool example:

Giving students the opportunity to play with their math can shift their paradigm. Those who previously struggled with math just might create new identities as mathematicians grounded in reasoning, problem-solving, and—most importantly—fun!

3.        Start a Math Play Table

Most of the students’ Dear Math letters that cite fun fondly recall elementary school, when there was a sense of play and they didn’t worry about answers; instead, they were just thinking and making sense of puzzles and manipulatives.

There is absolutely no reason why middle and high school students would not benefit similarly from manipulatives. Math education leader Sara VanDerWerf writes about a play table in her classroom, a space where her high school-aged students play around with mathematical items and create beautiful patterns in tangible ways. She has a couple of rules for this play table on her eponymous blog that make the table fun, challenging and open to everyone.

Here's one of the patterns on her post:

4.        Simply Have Fun in Class

Dear Math author Sara Strong recounts the story of one of her students, Hector. He was brilliant in math and had an uncanny ability to not take himself or the mathematics too seriously. In his letter, you can read the beautiful ways that he composes a story and showing his classmates that it's ok to love math and to be silly. Hector ended up reading this out loud to the whole class one day, and he had them all laughing hysterically.

The Final Word

Having fun in math class is integral to the brain development of our students, and it contributes to a classroom community founded in joy and a positive math identity. Best of all, we don’t need to sacrifice sense-making, deep thinking, deeper learning, or the innate beauty and intelligence of all learners to achieve it.

We also don’t need to leverage our authority in a way that makes math about tricks and right answers as determined by the teacher. All we really need are a few routines grounded in our core values and in the needs of all students, and we'll create more smiles and laughs every day.

Resource

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