The #1 Killer of Math Motivation is Not Disinterest But Overwhelm

by Justin Skycak (@justinskycak) on

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It’s amazing how many people turn out to enjoy math (or any other hard thing) when the tasks they’re asked to do are properly calibrated to their current level of skill.

image x.com/benhammersley/status/1885334463493636191

This didn’t happen from dinosaurs dancing across the screen or an adult clowning around trying to entertain a classroom.

The #1 killer of math motivation is not disinterest but overwhelm.

No matter how many jokes you crack, how many cool applications of math you show off, how much social interaction takes place in class, how excited you get students about math-heavy careers…

None of that matters if the material feels overwhelmingly difficult to learn.

You have to start at a point where the learner is solid on their foundations – this may mean starting at the bottom of some knowledge holes.

You have to provide enough review to keep them solid on those foundations as well as any new material they learn (because you can’t build on foundations that are crumbling away!)

And you have to present new material that is broken up into bite-size pieces with a high degree of guidance and scaffolding.

If you don’t do these things, you’re going to overwhelm the learner and make them hate math, unless they’re one of the few people who just happen to have enough intrinsic interest to fight through despite the overwhelm.

And even those people who initially fight through typically reach a point where the overwhelm eventually grows too large relative to their level of interest, and it pushes them off the math learning train.

What works for learners in general is to set up their practice conditions so that they are doing challenging tasks but succeeding in doing them – smoothly, without much struggle.

The biggest lever you can pull to make learning fun is to not overwhelm the learner. Don’t lower the overall bar for success, but scaffold the practice so that they successfully clear higher and higher bars until they’re doing the real thing.

Nothing succeeds like success.


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