Bring the Joy Back to Math Class
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?
Yeah, no one usually mentions “fun” and “math class” in the same sentence.
Yet, we’ve all read articles, books and Facebook memes that remind us to have fun … that it’s vital for our health and well-being as well as memory retention and enhanced learning.
In the article “The Benefits of Play for Adults” on HelpGuide.org, the authors state, “While play is crucial for a child’s development, it is also beneficial for people of all ages. Play can add joy to life, relieve stress, supercharge learning, and connect you to others and the world around you. Play can also make work more productive and pleasurable.”
So … how what can you do to get your students talking about fun in any class, let alone 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).
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.
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 3 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 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.
First, you can watch one of his many videos or figure out one of his memes on X, his website, or Facebook.
Second, 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.
Here's an example of one of Howie's:
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:
Trust us: you’ll soon be convinced of the value of setting up a math play table. It helps students continue to feel the playful fun and exploration they once experienced in elementary school, now carried on through their middle and high school years.
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.
Even though you’re teaching a sometimes-difficult subject, you can still make it enjoyable. Will every day be filled with laughter along with equations? Nope. Sometimes the joy comes from the “a-ha” moment. Other times it comes from connecting with the other students in the class. And sometimes it’s good to just find the fun in a Howie Hua post:
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.
Interested in learning more about Dear Math: Why Kids Hate Math and What Teachers Can Do About It?
Read More
- Strong, Sarah, and Gigi Butterfield. Dear Math: Why Kids Hate Math and What Teachers Can Do About It. Times 10 Publications, 2022.
- “Embrace the F Word in Your Classroom,” X10 blog
- Pausch, Randy. The Last Lecture. 2008. Hyperion.
- "The Benefits of Play for Adults." HelpGuide.org. November 3, 2018.
- Vennebush, G. Patrick. 2010. Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks. Robert Reed Pub.
Have you seen Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture Yet?
Back on September 18, 2007, Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch gave his inspirational last lecture before a packed crowd. It’s entitled, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” If you haven’t seen it yet, here you go.
Spoiler alert: as of today, it had over 21 million views, so it’s probably pretty good.
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How do people respond to teachers?
How would you?
Read More & Watch More Howie Hua on X
Resources
- Part of this text is taken from Dear Math: Why Kids Hate Math and What Teachers Can Do About It by Sara Strong and Gigi Butterfield.
- Color run image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay.
- Main post image by Paul Stachowiak from Pixabay.
- Margaret Mead quote by AZ Quotes.
- Red notebook image by Julian Rees from Pixabay.
- Sheet paper image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.
- Spiraling pentagon photo from SaraVanDerWerf.com.
- Two Fold math activity image by Mark Ordower at playwithyourmath.com.
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