German-born, Swiss and Australian educated Bea, a University Professor who teaches high level mathematics, completed the Compassionate Inquiry® Professional Training after reading, The Myth of Normal. One of Bea’s goals was to support her students’ learning experiences by expanding her ability to teach difficult subjects in accessible ways. She also learned new approaches that help her students resolve Maths Anxiety
This post is a short edited excerpt of Bea’s views on embodied learning, and how vulnerability, safety and curiosity support ‘whole’ human education. Hear her full interview on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
All of us can do maths. If you can go to school, if you’ve managed to learn to read and write, you can learn to do maths. It might come more naturally to some than to others. Some of us might have to work harder than others, but all of us can do it. Learning maths is like learning another language, the language of the sciences. It won’t make sense immediately. You have to work at it. That’s normal. When you learn a language, it’s hard. It doesn’t make sense straight away. And math is a very precise language. You may have to solve a problem, but you don’t know where to start. That’s perfectly normal.
When we learn, we bring our whole selves. Everything that’s happened, everything we carry within us, our families and our history… We bring it all. When I teach, I make a point of asking my students to introduce themselves, to build connections right up front. I want them to know that in the present moment, I see them, I want to hear them and I want to work through the material with them.
As a teacher, I can’t open the top of a student’s head, pour in the knowledge and close it up again. Often we are taught like that, but it doesn’t stick. To make learning stick, it needs to be embodied. Unfortunately, embodied education is not a prevalent approach.
To invoke embodied learning, a teacher has to lead by allowing themselves to be vulnerable, by letting our students know we can be wrong. But few teachers are comfortable being vulnerable, allowing themselves to make mistakes. Some of the teachers I teach say that if they actually admit they made a mistake, or were wrong, their class would destroy them.
Allowing ourselves to make mistakes is specifically important in mathematics. I’ve been talking to students about allowing themselves to make mistakes for some time, but only recently realized I hadn’t quite mastered this skill myself. Clearly, my students sensed that. When I speak about making mistakes now I do so with fully embodied authenticity. I’ve also learned to be gentle, compassionate and curious when I make a mistake.. I simply acknowledge, ‘I don’t know why I thought this…’ and I can let it go. So both how I talk about making mistakes, and my behavior when I do, have changed. That is what my students see and hear and learn now. I really would love it if we, collectively, as societies, could embrace this approach.
A prevailing American influence led us, as educators, to dumb things down. To pretend mathematics is easy is a devastating approach, because on one hand, maths is genuinely hard. And on the other hand, when maths’ difficulty is denied, it becomes no more than a collection of tricks or recipes. If you see this problem, you do that. It becomes mechanical. You just go through the recipe or follow the steps without understanding. That’s not mathematics.
Many mathematicians enjoy being challenged. We find mathematics hard. Excellent mathematicians admit that. A brilliant mathematician colleague vented about his frustration with a book he was reading as it took him so long to read a single page. That’s the challenge with mathematics, you don’t just read it, you have to work through it. So the idea that math is easy leads people who find it difficult to think that they’re not cut out for it, and cut themselves off from it.
Another facet of math’s challenging nature is that so many different explanations of mathematics are available. There are many different ways of thinking about, or approaching, what’s going on in our minds. If a textbook I’m reading doesn’t make sense to me, I’ll find another one that does. A concept might not be explained badly, but simply in a way that I found meaningless. So I always tell students to seek out the textbooks that work for them.
Maths Anxiety occurs when a student gets blocked and can’t find their way past that block. Their teacher needs to dig in and find out where their block is. ‘What is it that you’re not understanding?’ Students’ anxiety shows up in their body postures and in the ways they avoid answering questions. Some students will open up and share, others won’t. So when I explain something I’m teaching, I look around to see whose eyes are glazing over. I look to see who’s checked out. I notice who’s not asking questions, which is also specifically important in mathematics. Asking questions enables us to learn where they will take us.
I’ve always been able to spot these students, but before I did the Compassionate Inquiry training I didn’t really understand what was going on inside them. So I wasn’t able to say, “I see you. What you’re feeling is a completely normal response. You’ve frozen or run away, it’s okay, that happens. It’s an involuntary response of your nervous system. Something triggered you, and you’re off. Just catch your breath, do whatever you need to do to make yourself safe. Then come back to what we’re doing and ask the question if you don’t know what we got up to while you were gone for a while or leave.” We offer a lot of teaching online, so lectures are recorded. This makes it easy for students to stop watching, take time to regulate themselves, and come back to the recording later.Liberating students from Maths Anxiety comes through doing mathematics together. The profound truth is that they can overcome their limiting beliefs by actually doing Mathematics. And doing this also takes the whole person. A student can’t just sit there telling themself, ‘I can do this!’ That won’t work. But actually doing it together, knowing and feeling, ‘I’ve done this.’ Experiencing that they can do this, that it can make sense to them, is liberating. That’s also the beauty of teaching. I get to see the light bulb moments when the students realize, ‘I get this now.’
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the interview, and if you like it, please subscribe and share.
