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I will never forget my first week of teaching. Fresh out of my credentialing program, I was placed as an 11th Grade Mathematics teacher. I was determined to carry out the complex instruction that had intrigued me in my program. I envisioned students working collaboratively, creatively solving problems, and engaging in critical thinking. On the third day of class, I gave the students the following prompt: In the NFL, teams score 7 points for a touchdown and 3 points for a field goal. Given only these two opportunities for points, are there any final game scores that are impossible to obtain? If so, is there a highest impossible score? Nothing. A couple minutes later about a third of the class started experimenting, but the othersstill nothing. I walked over to a few students who were sitting idly and asked, What are you thinking about? They replied, We dont know what to do. I was shocked. The only skill necessary to access this problem is the ability to add numbers together, which all of the 11th graders in my class could do. Yet, still, they sat waiting for someone (probably me) to tell them exactly what to do and precisely how to think.

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People are born with an innate curiosity and a desire/need to make sense of their world through their experiences and interactions with it (Glasersfeld, 1995). We naturally experiment, conjecture, visualize, look for patterns, and attempt to communicate; in short, we are all born mathematical and there is significant evidence to suggest that young children develop mathematical structures even before attending school (Resnick, 1987). Somewhere along the way, my students have lost that confidence in their own mathematical thinking. To a large extent, this is an outcome of the school mathematics instruction that each child has been exposed to (Boaler, 2000). Mathematics has been taught as a finished set of rules, procedures, and formulas; things that have already been discovered and which students must now come to know. The typical transmission of this mathematics usually follows a similar process. The teacher stands at the front of the classroom and covers some new idea or topic for the day while the students take notes. Then the class does a few problems together with the instructor to make sure that the students have successfully adopted the teachers procedure for solving these types of problems. After that has been accomplished, the instructor assigns a set of problems, all relatively identical, in which students practice the same procedure over and over until they have reached mastery. ! 8!

It should not be surprising, then, that students are puzzled when explicit instructions about how to proceed have not been provided. As Alan Schoenfeld describes, When mathematics is taught as received knowledge rather than as something that (a) should fit together meaningfully, and (b) should be shared, students neither try to use it for sense-making nor develop a means of communicating with it. They have little idea, much less confidence, that they can serve as arbiters of mathematical correctness, either individually or collectively. Indeed, for most students, arguments (or proposed solutions) are merely proposed by themselves. Those arguments are then judged by experts who determine their correctness. Authority and the means of implementing it are external to the students (1994, p. 57). Students have learned that they are observers to, rather than participants in, mathematics and that experts must be consulted about how to solve a problem and how to ratify its solution. The vision of a student sitting helpless as they face an uncertain problem has surfaced many times since that third day of my career in the teaching profession. I knew then, and still know now, that this is a problem in our educational system that needs attention. As teachers, we should be instilling in our students powers of inquiry, confidence and creativity in problem solving, and a love of learning. Certainly, there needs to be a shift in how we define mathematics and in our vision of what the teaching and learning of that mathematics looks like in schools. It led me to wonder, How does a mathematics classroom centered in habits of ! 9!

mind support students mathematical agency? I want my students to know that we are all mathematical. I want them to recognize their own mathematical thinking and habits. I want them to view themselves as mathematicians, people who view the world with a mathematical lens and make sense of problems in the best way they can. I want them to have confidence in their own thinking. !

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