Kids Like Learning About Themselves More Than Math

That's a problem and a solution!

Welcome to new subscribers.

I write about teaching, especially teaching math, and especially how technology can support that work. Since I started working in edtech, I have added a lot of edtech readers to a subscriber list that was mostly math teachers in years past. Both areas interest me a lot but if only one of them interests you, feel free to scroll down to the “Odds & Ends” section where it’s pretty likely I’ll share and comment on a link that’s more lined up with your interests.

Why don’t kids like learning math?

Throw this question into the social media pond and you’ll get 100 answers rippling back at you, most of which are correct:

• Math doesn’t feel relevant to students.

• Math builds sequentially and it’s easy for a student’s learning needs to multiply.

• Teachers should explain more.

• Teachers should explain less.

• There is too much math to teach well.

• There isn’t enough time to develop fluency.

• All students do is develop fluency.

There is truth throughout that list, too much truth to be useful, so I find it helpful to reframe the question by asking, “Well what do kids like and why isn’t math be more like that?”

There is nothing more interesting to kids than kids—themselves and their peers.

This fact is fortunate for math teachers because kids have a lot of math ideas, even kids who don’t think they do, so the more we can make math about the ideas kids have, the more kids will like math.

Watch how that hypothesis played out for me in a class I taught last week.

Floats and Anchors (a lesson from our curriculum which you and your students can enjoy for free) starts by asking kids to mess around with a submarine, adding and subtracting “floats” and “anchors” to make a submarine capture a star. Eventually, students and teachers will turn this metaphor into ideas about adding and subtracting negative and positive numbers.

Kids were locked in here. They had agency. They could experiment on their own terms. They received our “responsive feedback” on their math ideas and experienced the joy in being the cause.

But they became especially locked in during three special moments which each used our technology in a very different way.

Settle a Dispute.

On one formative assessment screen, I noticed that the class was evenly split between two options. I showed them this display and told them to compare their choice to their classmates’ and talk about any disputes. After that conversation, I helped them convert each expression into a sentence about adding or subtracting floats and anchors.

Right the Wrong

The students sorted several combinations of floats and anchors into groups that make the submarine “Go Down” or “Go Up” or “Stay the Same.” I showed the entire class the single card of theirs that was sorted incorrectly most often and asked them to get more confident with their answer and the answers at their table. After that conversation, I helped them convert that card into a picture of the submarine’s movement.

Show Off

At the end of the lesson, we ask students to “Describe a set of actions that would allow this submarine to collect the star at 5 units.” Crucially, the screen asks students to “Try to come up with something none of your classmates will.” I emphasized that point and these students did not disappoint, offering answers similar to the ones below.

I snapshotted several of their responses, including one that was incorrect, and asked the class to decide which of them were correct and which needed a correction. I can only guess here, but the class was much more engaged in those responses than they would have been had I brought along those exact same responses as prefabrications.

Their math.

Quite simply, we talked a lot about their math and their thinking. This focus changes how kids engage with math because they are fundamentally engaging with themselves—a topic they like a lot. But this also changes how kids learn about math. As summarized by the cognitive scientist David Ausubel, “The most important single factor influencing learning is what a learner already knows.” Asking a kid to engage in what they already know is good for their engagement and for creating necessary connections between old and new knowledge.

At Amplify, we are using technology to invite thinking from students, especially from students who may not think they have any thinking to offer, especially using screens with our responsive feedback designs. But we also use technology to collect and analyze those ideas from around the class, not for the sake of evaluation, rather for the sake of connection. For connection between old and new ideas, yes. But also for connecting people, for developing their “collective effervescence,” a feeling of social cohesion and belonging that is central to most of the experiences we cherish most in life.

PS. Why I decided to write about Unbound Academy last week.

I have received largely positive responses to my article last week criticizing Unbound Academy and its learning model. It was linked in Kappan where they were careful to refer to me as a “non-journalist.” It’s the top result if you search for “Arizona Unbound Academy,” above all of the earlier and IMO overly credulous articles written by real journalists. I have been contacted by several journalists working on their own stories, looking to trade notes.

One of those journalists asked me why the story caught my attention. I said, it’s because I think teaching is very hard.

I taught for the better part of a decade, occasionally successfully, often badly, but never for lack of trying. It’s just hard. It’s hard, cognitively, to help a novice understand anything new. And it’s especially hard doing that work with lots of novices in the same room all within the tight social and economic constraints of 2025 America.

So as a general rule: if you tell me that you can swap a skilled teacher for a chatbot on a Lenovo Chromebook, if you tell me that the work of teaching is anything so trivial, I am going to take that personally and I am going to pull your card.

Odds & Ends

¶ Michael Pershan’s 56 Theses About Education, for Fun and Debate is just good. If you want to understand the very likely impossible role society has asked schools and teachers to serve, the difficulty of change, the institutional contradictions at the heart of schooling, you should read it.

¶ Homelessness rose 18% in 2024. It rose 39% among families with children. You have to understand that this is an education story.

¶ Geoff Krall is writing about “How to Get Your PhD in Math Education.” If you are considering that choice for your life, consider his series your first required reading. I have linked to his entry on writing, which resonated with me a lot. PS. I hope the professional groups that are concerned with the pipeline of math education professors—JRME and AMTE, for example—are tuned into Geoff’s writing here.

¶ I love headlines like “AI ready to hit its stride in schools in 2025.” They are non-falsifiable and evergreen and we will see them for years. The author’s main contention is that AI was not ready to hit its stride in 2024 because teachers hadn’t yet had enough professional development and the US Department of Education hadn’t yet released its AI toolkit. Maybe! I do struggle to imagine the teacher who saw tons of educational value in AI but was waiting until the federal government gave them the okay. But maybe!

¶ Last September, Oprah interviewed Bill Gates about AI in education. I pointed out that his comments about AI sounded a lot like what he’s said about other forms of technology for nearly a decade. As evidence, I linked to several pages on his “Gates Notes” blog like this one, and I am only bringing this up to note that several of those pages are no longer available. If anyone knows anyone on Gates’s web team, maybe let them know!