So, something I’ve realized lately is that so many of you are like me and you are looking for someone to tell you what to do. 

Over a week ago, I offered a free webinar, and during the Q&A portion of that webinar, there were so many questions about how people should structure their math time and how do we incorporate Number Sense activities when we also need to follow our textbook, or their district is telling them they need to do small group work, or on and on and on it goes.

I’m Christina Tondevold, the Recovering Traditionalist, and I hope you’ll stick around as we investigate how to structure your math time in our quest to build our math minds, so we can build the math minds of our students.

Watch the video or read the transcript below:

Here are links to products/activities mentioned in this vlog. (Some may be affiliate links which just means that if you do purchase using my link, the company you purchased from sends me some money. Find more info HERE about that.)

Video series prior videos
#1: Why you shouldn’t teach math through a textbook
#2: How to Teach Elementary Math Without a Textbook
#3: Creating School Change When Others Don’t Want To
#4: Components of Number Sense in PreK-2
#5: Components of Number Sense in 3rd-5th
#6: Teaching Math through Story Problems
#7: Math Practice: Building Math Fluency through Games

Rachel Hollis books

Now, it wasn’t just that webinar where I got responses like that. I got emails from people responding to my recent video series about how to teach math without a textbook. So, I thought I needed one more video to go along with that series to kind of give you one last final message. 

That final message is: No One Can Give You The Answer For You.

You can’t wait for someone to just tell us what to do

I know that you might have come to this video because it says I’m going to tell you how to structure your math time. The problem is I can’t. I can not tell you. 

That’s what I was doing in this video series was giving you my recommendation, but you need to Do You. The number one thing I want you to take away from this is that you can’t wait for someone to just tell you what to do. 

Don’t just copy what someone else says.  Whether that’s me or something you read in a book. You are learning from other peoples’ experiences when you listen to my videos, when you read one of these books behind me, but you also have these other circumstances that are pushing on you like your current group of students, like what your principal is telling you needs to happen, like your district, but also, you see what other teachers around you are doing.  Whether that’s the teacher next door or on Instagram or wherever you’re looking, we all have these little pressures that we’re feeling, whether we’re acknowledging it or not. 

Some of them are real pressures, and some of them are pressures that we’re putting on ourselves to kind of live up to a certain expectation, but you need to remember that your classroom of kids are not the same as anyone else’s.  Even if it’s the same school district and the same grade level, every group of kids is different, and you personally are a different teacher than someone else. So, what works for someone else may not work for you, and it may not work for your group of students.

You need to find the answer within yourself

Now, the last thing I want to leave you with are two quotes that are not from me. I recently got to attend a conference where Ms. Rachel Hollis was speaking, and if you’re not familiar with Rachel Hollis, I like to call her the modern-day Tony Robbins. I still listen to Tony Robbins. I like learning from him, but Rachel Hollis is like the new guru, especially for women, in personal and professional growth and development. 

If you’re wanting to grow as a person, grow professionally, she is such a great motivational speaker. She’s got fabulous books. 

But I got to see her in person, and it was amazing. She’s a great speaker.  There were two messages that she, well she may not have meant them to come across, but these were two big things that I took away.  Especially, because I got to watch her right after I had done these webinars, and I had all of these things in mind of the issues that teachers were having and the struggles they were having, and these two quotes from Rachel really hit home to me. 

The first one is: you know what you need to do, but you don’t do it because it’s hard. 

Now, that can be anything personally, but I think it’s also especially true in our classrooms. We hear these things, we read these things, and we know we should maybe be doing them, but it’s hard, it is hard to change our teaching. And so, we tend to make excuses, whether they’re real excuses or fake excuses, like we think that they’re an excuse. 

One of the other quotes that Rachel said is: people can’t hold you back unless you give them the reins. 

This is one of the biggest excuses I hear over and over again, and again, this may be a true thing for you, or it might be an imagined thing.  People will tell me that they can’t do something, whatever that something might be, whether it’s doing Number Sense activities, whether it’s doing math running records or anything that I recommend, there’s a lot of this pressure of I can’t do this, because my principal wants us to do this, our district is expecting this. 

I don’t know, so you have to make sense of this for your situation, but sometimes, that is imaginary. We think we can’t, because we don’t feel empowered to make that change. We know it’s hard to make that change, so we say, “well, I can’t because my principal does this, this, and this, or says we need to do this, this, and this.”

I want you to ask how often are they actually in that classroom with you and those students, and are they really in there checking in to see if you’re doing X, Y, or Z that they have mandated?? All too often in education, we get these mandates that say, you have to do this thing, and then they never come into your classroom to check to see if you’re actually doing it. 

I’m not telling you to just go against what people are saying that you need to do, but I want you to reflect honestly. How often do these mandates get put down and then, nothing ever gets done about them??? Nobody’s checking in. Nobody’s seeing how it’s going. Nobody’s seeing if it’s actually working for the students or reflecting upon is this the right thing for our students. 

The other thing I want you to be thinking about is what would happen. Let’s say you’re supposed to be doing small group instruction, or you’re supposed to be going lesson by lesson by lesson in your textbook, and perhaps, your principal comes in one day, and you’re doing a game. And that game happens to be hitting the same mathematical concept as the lesson in your book, but you’re playing a game instead of doing the workbook pages. What’s going to happen? What would really happen? And do you have a clear understanding in your mind to say, “yeah, I wasn’t doing that page, because…” And would that be okay? I don’t know. I don’t know your situation. 

I want you to personally reflect upon that and make a decision about, are you giving the reins to somebody else when really they don’t have those reins to hold you back? Often times, we give people those reins imaginarily.

We think they have control of a situation, when really they don’t, and we’ve just put that there because we want to be able to say, “I can’t do this because somebody says I can’t.” It’s easier to just say I can’t, I don’t have control of this situation, instead of realizing you do have the reins. And again, I hope you have the reins, because you are that group of students’ teacher. You’re in there everyday all day with them, and you see the understandings they have and the misunderstandings they have. 

You might be in a situation where the reins really aren’t in your hands, and that’s a different story. You can back to some of the other videos in this series. But I really want you to reflect upon, why aren’t we doing it? And typically, we aren’t doing it because it’s hard, but also because we think that someone else has the reins and we don’t have control. I want you to reflect and think about do you really, do you have that control? 

If so, take the reins and start making a change in your teaching. I’ve given you my suggestions throughout this video series. You can take my suggestions, you can modify it, you can go find suggestions from anywhere else, but I want you to really reflect upon why you’re doing what you’re doing. Is it just because it’s always been done that way? Is it because it’s too hard to make a change? Is it really because we don’t have those reins? 

Then, figure out what the root cause is, and then go from there. I am going to get off of my soapbox about this. We’ll get back to some videos about math content, but I really want you to reflect upon why you are structuring your math time the way it’s structured and really be reflective upon, is this what’s best for my students? 

If it’s not, if you really feel in your heart, it’s not the best thing for your students, then start making small changes to get to that point where you are excited and comfortable and just thrilled about the mathematical activities that are happening in your classroom instead of dreading that math time. 

I’m sorry, I got a little weepy, but man, I’m going to blame Rachel Hollis for this. She got me all excited and motivational, and I really want you to be thinking deeply about why we’re doing what we’re doing during our math time. So I hope that this video has helped you build your math mind, so that you can get out there and build the math minds of your students. Have a great day.