THUNDER BAY – The Thunder Bay Catholic District School Board implemented the Love Math Journal on Friday, with a visit from author Nicole Thompson at St. Bernard School.
Grade 6 student, Paula Arenas, felt motivated by the presentation and book.
“I learned about positivity to math," Paula said. "I was really negative about math because I didn’t feel like I was enough for math."
“It’s important (to be positive) because if you’re negative, you won’t be able to think, ‘what’s the answer?’” she added.
Nicole Thompson, founder of The Fulfilled Classroom, is one of the authors of the Love Math Journal.
“The Love Math Journal is one of the resources that I created with a co-author of mine, a math professor from California," Thompson said. "It is a social emotional learning resource in math that helps students develop a growth mindset and change their ideas around math in the classroom."
Thompson said the Grade 6 students at St. Bernard were engaged and had a lot of good ideas about math on Friday morning.
“We see a lot of mixed emotions about math. When the students are at this age, math gets more abstract and less concrete for them. It can be really hard to wrap your mind around," said Thompson.
The presentation mentioned two different types of mindsets: fixed and growth.
Thompson said many people in general have a fixed mindset surrounding math. She highlighted the importance of a having growth mindset.
“I see fixed mindset a lot in a lot of my students, especially around math," said Thompson. “They've gone through schooling where they had a lot of difficulties and they might have dropped out of high school. Now they're back trying to do it as adults, and those pathways are very much set in stone."
“When we can talk to kids at a young age about their brain and how we can create these pathways to make things easier for us as we get older, it’s a great opportunity, especially in math class while they're at a young age, like grade six,” she said.
Thompson said she gets positive feedback that students are enjoying using them.
“It's just a little bit of a fresh take on math class and it's one or two minutes a day. That's all it takes is a quick little discussion or just a mindful prompt about math and it can be just that simple,” Thomson said.
Katie Matthews, TBCDSB Mental Health lead, in collaboration with Melanie Biesenthal, Coordinator of Mathematics, brought Thompson’s Love Math Journal to several grade 6 classes within the board.
Matthews said many students struggle with how they think about math.
“Perhaps that comes from messages from their parents or maybe past experiences where they really didn't enjoy the math class or the process of learning about math," said Matthews. “(Thompson) has developed a tool to really help change that thinking.”
There was a divide that measured to be about half of the students loving math and the other half not loving math.
“For me personally, I would have been one of the people who fell on the ‘not loving math’ side. To me, it made sense that we have a pretty split representation,” Matthews said.
She added she is always looking at ways to incorporate, build and think about what mental well being looks like and means.
“Any opportunity to build cross curricular connections, bring it into places that people traditionally don't think of as being connected to mental health, is super important because we know mental well-being is foundational to any academic achievement,” Matthews said.
Biesenthal said sometimes students really think if they're not good at math, that means that they're not fast at mathematics.
“If they're not able to think about it quickly, this is what the Love Math Journal is really about, thinking about that. Mathematics actually is a slow process and we really need to take our time to think through problems," she said. “It's just reiterating that message that mathematics, when we're problem solving, is complex and that we can slow down and that they're capable of doing that.”
Biesenthal is hopeful the journal will create opportunities for students to reflect on their thinking
“The nice part of this journal is that they're going to have it for the entire year. This is something they're going to be visiting all year long and reflecting on," Biesenthal said.
Newswatch asked Grade 6 students from St. Bernad school what they learned, the unanimous answer was that positivity and math go hand in hand.
One student said they also learned if you make a mistake, you can learn from it, and added, “I’m not really a math person, but after this I think I’ll start doing more math at home.”
