The Most Brilliant Math I've Seen Lately

My gratitude to Bill Ferriter for this slide is immeasurable.

I'm grateful for it as a teacher and as a parent.

In some ways it's easier for me to remember this as a teacher.

I know my students, their strengths and challenges, their amazing talents, their senses of humor, their annoying habits, THEM. I know what they can do as readers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, historians, thinkers. Sometimes their test scores match what I know from our work in the classroom. Sometimes their test scores surprise me in a positive way and I take a closer look. Sometimes their test scores surprise me because they don't show their strengths as I would expect. I take a closer look at those too. I can learn from the test scores.

But they are not my students. They do not define them.

Why is it harder for me to remember that as a parent?


I feel confident that my daughters do not have any idea that this is a struggle for me. We, as parents, work very hard to ensure that our kids understand that we care about their learning, their effort, their thinking more than we do their grades or test scores.