The actual socratic method is even more insane. Socrates asks an ignorant person a series of questions to bring out knowledge that each of has access to prior to any experience of the world.

I think there’s a very good chance that my daughter is misunderstanding or misreading the situation in several respects. She’s very sensitive about feeling like she’s wrong about something and equally sensitive about anything that feels like a public rebuke. I do think that the teacher is using some kind of cold call technique, and it’s possible that she’s not aware that my daughter (or potentially others) feel exposed or vulnerable because of it, but it’s also very possible that the teacher is being very careful and doing a lot of the pedagogically careful things that you and others have recommended and it’s my daughter’s oversensitivity that’s really the interesting issue.

I think she does have what seems to me to be a consistent cognitive style when it comes to math that I recognize because it’s how I felt all through math as well in K-12: readily understanding concepts, never feeling comfortable with calculation (either in terms of speed or accuracy). So I used to get wrong answers, especially in high school, but I could explain to the teacher not only how you were supposed to get the right answer but what the point of the problem was. It would usually just turn out that I’d ended up forgetting to add 3 at one point or something along those lines. I don’t know that I want to tell my daughter too much about that right now as it feels like I’m handing her a ready-made alibi for doing poorly in math. I wish I’d stuck with it longer and devoted more effort to it myself.

This sounds familiar in that a few years back, Eldest went through some crisis moments in math education that were tied more to confidence than competence. Cold-calling is incredibly difficult to carry off as an educator with very sensitive students but, as you note, pretty much integral to some subjects such as math.

Eldest is halfway through high school now and has developed the maturity to volunteer in math class and be philosophical about matters if she’s gotten the answer wrong. She certainly didn’t have that comfort level in the middle school years.

I like Western Dave’s comments to approach the teacher about your daughter’s frustration. That might not be apparent in the classroom but, once informed, a good teacher will understand how to balance out the activities.

Otherwise, as university educators, we all should be mindful of our own classroom practices. In my survey classes, I include a ‘starter question’ in the syllabus for every day in the classroom. It helps students direct their reading and signals where we’ll begin. If everyone’s had that question beforehand, there’s also a sense that I’m being “fair” by calling upon people (although I always ensure that volunteers have a chance to contribute). It also is an icebreaker — if we start talking from the get-go, it’s easy to keep that participatory momentum going and bring in new questions as the class progresses.

There are a bunch of issues with cold-calling, which I think are best treated separately.

The first is the sense of being picked on. Very natural. There are a lot of strategies for dealing with this, the simplest being random draw. I don’t trust my own ability to randomly select a student, so if I were doing much cold-calling, I’d try that. Teacher manner also plays a role: if the teacher is friendly and encouraging and emphasize that mistakes are totally cool (if it’s the kind of question where there can be a specific mistake), the students are more likely to be ok with it.

The second is the pedagogical value. I think there’s real value in insisting on students speaking even when they’re uncomfortable doing so, and making sure that the class isn’t just dominated by the thoughts of the few students who participate. Cold-calling is one way to achieve that. Another is to have a question everyone answers, or a question every other/third person answers if there’s not space, or an opportunity for every one/other/third person to share a comment or thought.

The third is what questions lend themselves to cold-calling. I think the people who point to the need to develop rapid and immediate fluency are making a compelling case for cold-calling in that sort of class. Extremely open-ended questions also go well, especially if the instructor emphasizes that he or she is looking for people’s thoughts, that they can be experimental, that they can change their minds halfway through, and most especially if the instructor is the kind of good listener and facilitator who can extract an interesting point from some slightly confused thoughts.

The worst kind of cold-calling is the kind of thing where there’s a definite right answer but it requires some thought.

———–

Western Dave wrote:
Tim,
How accurate is your daughter reading the situation? For example, does the teacher ask for volunteers early but say that all students will answer at least one question and she will call on people if they haven’t said something within a set time period (I do this with upper school girls and co-ed classes with reminders like “we still haven’t heard from so and so yet, I’m going to be calling on you soon if you don’t volunteer). Also, how is the teacher reacting when she gives wrong answers. Is the teacher praising the pieces she got right? Or asking her to explain how she got there? I’ve had some students who felt absolutely humiliated in my class when they’ve answered stuff wrong, but neutral observers (there at my invitation to help me and the kid) said it wasn’t me. The kid had a narrative in her head about what was going on, but it wasn’t an accurate reflection of what was happening in the classroom (lot’s of other people were getting things wrong, she was actually ge
tting a lot right but focusing on the pieces she got wrong etc.).

So rather than immediately raising hell with the teacher try this. Tell the teacher that your daughter is experiencing a lot of frustration about math (which she never has before) and that your stumped as to why. You want to be a good supportive parent so what can you do to help your daughter. If you get a response that sounds like the teacher is talking about your girl and has helpful suggestions run with those. If the teacher seems clueless about your daughter as a kid but says she never volunteers, try this: “she has some issues around anxiety and tends to freeze up in cold calling situations is there a way you could cue her that she is going to be the next person called on?” Lots of IEPs have stuff about this in them and the teacher will recognize this language. Ze will probably have an established procedure with this. (Mine is that, because I move around the room a lot, I’ll stand in front of your desk when I’m about to call on you both for the anxiety kids and t
he distraction kids). Another technique might be for her to ask a question about a problem (even if she already knows the answer) to make it look like she talked. For my students that have really bad anxiety about talking in class, I usually have them script a question for a couple of classes (that is, they’ll have a question about the hw ready for the start of class, one they’ve e-mailed me the night before and I’ve okayed). This helps get them over the talking hump in the first couple of weeks of class.
You also need to figure out: is she getting bored, getting the concepts, letting her attention wander and then being embarrassed at getting caught and thus getting flustered. Is this only around math? It never happens with other subjects? I think she’s a year older than my girl so it’s not like she’s got a separate teacher for all her subjects. And BTW what math curriculum is being used?

I really like to think about Wittgenstein’s discussions of math in the Philosophical Investigations. He makes a very convincing case that math is not at all rigid and entirely rule-governed, as we often think and always tell our youngsters. It’s a social practice that is not essentially different from any other. At some point we have to stop giving explicit instructions (we run out of them) and trust the student to continue as we would. I think telling students this would very much validate their feelings about math. How can it be true, as we say, that math is clean and simple and rule-governed and still be so hard? If it’s so easy, how can I come to a point where I am hesitant to continue, don’t know how to continue? Doing math – continuing where the teacher left off – is prone to that very familiar social worry we all have: am I doing this right? But in so much as it is, we need to emphasize a whole different skill set for dealing with the anxiety and difficulty of learning math and doing math. We need to be calm, have confidence, be tolerant of error (ours and others). It sounds like the teacher is not only neglecting to teach this, but demonstrating otherwise with his/her actions.