This is Ben’s Blog Post. I promised him full credit; he deserves it. Ben is an amazing, amazing kid. He came to me a year ago, struggling with number sense, especially place value. Over the course of one summer, he went from scoring in the “red” in his school’s assessment system (AIMSweb, for the teachers among you) to scoring in the “green,” bypassing yellow altogether. How/why did this happen? By working on number sense and place value over the summer, he came into the start of the school year more available for classroom learning. And the key word there is working. This child works so hard, it blows my mind. He really understands that he has a huge role in his outcome: the harder he works, the smarter he gets.

What I didn’t expect is that he would get smarter than me.

Today, Ben learned how to multiply by 10, an algorithm that most children find easy. For Ben, it is not easy. Algorithms are hard for him to remember, so he has to truly understand what is going on from a conceptual point of view, and then develop his own system to remember it. He did that. It took work, and trial and error, and lots of modeled thinkalouds. Along the way, we talked about our strategies for what to do when we encounter problems we don’t understand – how to combat the surge of stress that blocks our brains. We all know that feeling – all of us.

Ben has gone to survival camp. My guess is that school often feels like a survival situation for him – it is not set up for him to succeed, no matter how hard he works. He is one of the neurodiverse – all of us are – someone with a brain as unique as a fingerprint, but in his case, his brainprint is not the kind that schools were originally designed to serve. His strengths are many and beautiful, but they are harder to see. So today, as we went over our strategies to combat the mental panic that so many people (93% of the USA, by some measures) encounter when they see a math problem that they deem difficult, Ben interrupted me. “I have gone to survival camp, you see. The first thing you do is DON’T PANIC. Take a deep breath.”

Well, yes. That is the first thing you do. Anxious thoughts take up valuable working memory space, the exact same neurological space that manipulates numbers in the brain. So if you panic, you can’t do the math. If you can breathe through it, clear the panic, it’s almost miraculous how quickly your math ability returns.

“Then you find a stream and follow it out, and if you can’t to that, you find a shelter and stay put.” Sounds good to me. I added one more step – retrace your steps a bit. Not too far, but just far enough that you might start to see some familiar landmarks. And what followed is one of the most brilliant approaches to doing math that I have ever encountered. From Ben comes brilliance.

So how does this apply to math, anyway?

• Don’t panic. Take a slow, deep breath, and clear your mind of the fear. You have done this before; you can do it again.
• Retrace your steps: go back through the examples and see if you can remember what you did. See if any familiar landmarks pop out that can give you a clue on what to do next.
• Follow the stream: the rules of math are the stream. There are multiple ways to solve every math problem, as long as you follow the basic rules of math. You may not know the answer to the problem, but you know somethingabout the problem. Try it out, and see if it changes the landscape for you. You may be out of the woods before you know it.
• If all else fails, don’t keep wandering aimlessly. Find a shelter and stay put. I call wandering aimlessly the “shotgun approach” to math. You kind of throw everything you have at it, hoping that one random guess is right and the teacher will move on to someone else. Sorry buddy, this is a class of one. Find a shelter – facts that you are sure you know. Then stay put and the teacher will help you get back on the path.

If it’s a good teacher, s/he’ll help you see that you were on the path the whole time. You can do this. Just don’t panic.

Thanks, Ben, for helping me to find the path.