Steve Holyfield was having trouble breathing.
Holyfield, a respected math teacher at a K-12 public charter school in Apple Valley, Calif., was in rapid decline.
His students watched the effects of his illness creep into his body. At first, he stumbled, had weak hands, and relied entirely on his teaching assistant to write equations on the blackboard. His voice then became very weak and could only be heard with effective boost from the microphone. It also amplified his strained breathing and its stopped rhythm.
“My biggest central memory of Holyfield’s class is the sound of his heavy breathing as he pauses for exactly 10 seconds,” his student Christina Lynn Wallace says more than a decade later. “We couldn’t hear him take a breath, but then he started moving again and [we’d] Think, “Oh my god.” Is he going to die in our classroom? ”
The school held a festival to ~ Fundraising for medical expenses It stemmed from a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. However, within a short period of time, Holyfield died.
As the United States struggles with math instruction, there is growing interest in cultural perceptions of who has good math skills. The concept that certain people are “bad at math” has been criticized as follows: Racist, sexist, classist, genetic and inaccurate.. We are particularly concerned that this classification will exacerbate inequalities in lucrative and important science, technology, engineering and mathematics careers, as it may push students away from these career paths. Of course, people may also label themselves, thanks to both internal and external factors.
Holyfield’s death was a well-known tragedy in the High Desert, a region of California about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, in part because Holyfield was respected as a dedicated math teacher.
More than a decade later, I tracked down several of his former students. Lessons I learned: Great teachers seem to make a huge difference in how students view their math potential and whether they accept the label of “bad at math.”
bedtime equation
After becoming EdSurge’s resident math reporter for the past few years, I decided to interview some of Holyfield’s former students.
When we interviewed experts about why math students across the country were struggling, they often commented that part of the problem was cultural. Sources say it’s common for anyone, even teachers, to brag about not being “good at math,” and that reading is something no one proudly proclaims. My favorite way to express this view is that parents, regardless of their educational level, typically take pride in reading bedtime stories to their children. We don’t need to be convinced that something is important because we intuitively feel it is. But how many parents follow the bedtime equation?
For a long time, I also thought I was bad at math. As I reflected on my own self-perception, I had a vague feeling that it had something to do with Holyfield’s Algebra II class that I took in ninth grade. That year, a substitute teacher who came out of retirement and couldn’t understand math replaced him in at least one class as his classmates watched his body ravage from ALS. Up until then, I had never been particularly good at mathematics, but after that I maintained a policy of not having any contact with mathematics, but that changed in the latter half of my university life, when I became interested in economics and statistics. It was only when I started having it.
But when I compared my memories to others as part of this reporting process, a different story emerged.
Holyfield’s ordeal did not seem to deter many students from mathematics. The opposite is true. According to six former students I interviewed, Holyfield himself had a talent for connecting with students. That was even, or perhaps especially, if they did not consider themselves “mathematicians”.
“He was a complete human being,” Natalie Snyder, Holyfield’s teaching assistant, said shortly before his death. He was good at building relationships that engaged students in math, whether or not they perceived themselves as skilled at working with numbers, she says.
And that remained true even when Holyfield suddenly died from ALS, she added.
Holyfield’s decline was upsetting to Wallace, who remembers his stuttering breathing. “I was friends with his daughter Brianna, and I’m sitting here watching her father die in front of me,” she says. However, this turmoil did not necessarily spill over into mathematics. “It was traumatic, but not from an academic standpoint,” she says.
That self-awareness was deeper and older. Wallace was already bad at math when she took the class, she said.
She says Wallace has a good memory for numbers. She can remember the debit card number and security code for a place she stayed a week ago, showing that her brain isn’t allergic to numbers. However, identifying yourself as a “non-mathematical” person can help you cope when you feel anxious about solving mathematical equations. She added that she is slow in math but also slow in reading. She says she has never “felt guilty” for not liking math, but she does sometimes feel ashamed for not being a great reader.
Looking back on this episode, what stands out most to me is that the students who admired Holyfield still felt drawn to him. Their own feelings about mathematics can be influenced by their teachers. But they came from a deeper place.
This seemed to apply to my own experience with memories being unleashed. My math phobia was older, but originally more mild. Like so many things, it was born out of a feedback loop. Debilitating anxiety and declining math performance both hindered learning, and by the time I arrived in Holyfield’s class, the pattern had been established. By the time my parents struggled to help me with my math homework in early middle school, I began to compare myself to my maternal grandfather, Aladdin Perkins. Aladdin Perkins was a former electrical engineer who had little patience for dull things. Once I had him explain a problem to me and I was in awe. It was as if mathematics poured out of him like a sieve. I’m slow in math, so I figured I’d have to look elsewhere to improve my grades. As my attention to math decreased, my average score decreased and my dislike for the subject increased, which was not realistic for me anyway.
According to Colleen Ganley, an associate professor of developmental psychology at Florida State University, the most common way to understand this phenomenon is that worrying about math causes students to avoid it, which in turn reduces their progress in math. It means it’s going to be late. On the other hand, poor performance increases anxiety.
So how do people become non-mathematicians? According to Dana Miller Cott, an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, people tend to be turned away from mathematics during adolescence and college. Until third or fourth grade, she says, most kids think of themselves as mathematicians. Young children tend to overestimate their abilities, but by that time they begin to compare themselves to others. Around this time, students receive “implicit messages” from their parents and teachers (parents and teachers may respond more favorably to some students than others, such as by calling them more frequently, or may have a negative impact on math. may express disgust), but tend to be: Wait, she says.
But in some ways, American culture places too much emphasis on qualities associated with mathematics. For some reason, there is a general belief that everyone who goes into fields such as mathematics, economics, or computer science will excel, perhaps in part because these fields are financially rewarding. Millercott says. She added that some students seem to have a misconception that math is a trick rather than a process. People who enter these high-paying fields are inherently smart. She says it comes with the belief that being good at math means all the answers are correct. It is as if such people were born with a calculator in their head, rather than simply being engaged in performing mathematics frequently.
Ultimately, Millercott said, it seems to alienate students, especially women and black students, by making them feel like they don’t belong to the “math community.”
But what do students think about themselves? some the study They suggest that how well students perform in mathematics indirectly influences whether they consider themselves competent in mathematics. From this perspective, what really matters is how interested they are in mathematics and how much external recognition they receive.
Millercott suggests that teachers have a huge influence. She says it’s important to ensure that the messages and opportunities to engage with math are equal for everyone you teach. She says the key is not to tell all students that they are good at math, but to find ways to engage them more.
Holyfield was an expert at using this view to generate interest and legitimacy, former students say.
But for his students, the longevity of that interest varied.
Tracking mathematical identity
Snyder, Holyfield’s former teaching assistant, said she admits she’s not good at math. By fourth grade, she recognized her math skills as “weak.” One problem was that her math class felt slow because she didn’t remember her multiplication tables.
That caused anxiety, she says.
Still, she says Holyfield helped make math more practical for her when they took Algebra II together. He explains how mathematics helps in real-world jobs, such as testing land levels for construction or creating maps, and how as a student you can already do that mathematics. did. It was fun, she recalls. But more than that, he was careful to make her feel that math was valuable.
However, due to “senileitis,” he dropped out of his high school calculus course. During her university years, she had limited exposure to mathematics. She began studying organic chemistry, but felt overwhelmed and quit higher education altogether. She then earned a degree in public administration from Chico State University, a four-year university in California.
Felisha Callum viewed her mathematical talent favorably.
Karam took Algebra II and Trigonometry from Holyfield. Holyfield helped her get one of her first jobs, becoming a math tutor. She started calculus, but that was “the year he got really bad,” and when he retired due to illness, the class was replaced by another teacher.
Callum dropped out of calculus after that semester. Eventually, she earned a graduate degree in clinical mental health counseling from George Fox University, a private Christian university in Oregon, where she currently works as an instructor in a play therapy program.
Another former teaching assistant, Kuredow Feskens, furthered her mathematics journey. She describes herself as a “math brain.”
Ms. Feskens actually declared that she was majoring in mathematics in college. She says it was Holyfield’s influence. She took Algebra I, Algebra II, and Calculus with him. After many years of reflection, she says that she became interested in mathematics not because of her own innate talent for numbers, but because of his encouragement. Although she grew up in a strict household where doing your best was extremely important, she says Holyfield was encouraging, kind and always made her feel like her best self.
However, the Holyfield effect wore off, and Feskens changed his major from mathematics to business. I thought mathematics was more practical. These days, she’s a recruiter, but she no longer describes herself as a mathematician. She is still good at algebra and calculus, the classes Holyfield took, but she sometimes struggles with simpler math.
As a former student of Holyfield and now a journalist covering mathematics, I was struck by how sensitive people’s beliefs about themselves were. Without encouragement from gifted teachers, people who were prone to love math turned away from it. Once this happens, the identity becomes entrenched and it becomes difficult to return to learning mathematics.
Still, they look back on Holyfield fondly.
Now an adult, Feskens says she hopes Holyfield understands the depth of his influence. As his illness progressed, she helped organize a school fundraising event called Holifalooza. She recalls that they didn’t raise a lot of money, maybe about $100. But I hope it leaves an impression on men.
“I wish more people could experience his teachings, and I wish there were more teachers like him,” she says.
