Open Set

When I taught math to gifted students, at a school with a wide range of math options, I heard a lot of “This class is too easy for me!” It was usually in my role as program coordinator, more often than in my role as a teacher. (My students learned quickly that if Question 1 was too easy, hold on to your hat, because that was just the warm-up and Question 2 would be much harder!) Rather, as program coordinator, many kids and parents would come to me with this complaint. The students was in the wrong class, one that was too easy for them. 

Ever the scientist, I would always investigate. Do some observations, look at samples of student work, give them a placement test, etc. Occasionally, the complaint was correct, and I’d move the kid to a more advanced class. But usually, “too easy” meant that the class was really too hard.

Now, there were plenty of times when we would move a student to a harder class. But those moves were usually initiated by the teacher, who would come to me saying that one of their students was consistently at the top of the class. My impression is, kids are not always aware of struggles faced by other students around them. Our classes had a decent amount of open-ended problems with enough depth. We avoided repetition and lecture. Top students would not realize that their methods were always superior to those of their classmates, or even understand that their classmates were taking longer to learn the new concept. Besides, it feels good to be at the top of the class, so those kids were not usually complaining.

But the ones who were complaining about their class being too easy, more often than not, all the signs would point to the idea that the class was too hard.

Not to say that the kids are lying! So, how do they develop that perception?

It might just be that they are trying really hard to come up with a reason to not attempt the problems. “Too easy” is a good one, no point in my trying to do this work if it is beneath me. Add to that the fact that most of them have been in math classes that were too easy for them before they came to our school, and they associate that feeling of not wanting to do the work with being in a class that’s too easy. 

I also noticed that some of these students had weaker-than-expected executive functioning skills. In particular, they had a hard time starting a new problem, envisioning what was going on so they could begin to use their skills to come up with a solution. But a lot of math problems look similar to each other. Small details change that make it very different to solve. So, they look at the problem, and don’t really see all those details. All they see is the general structure, and they know they’ve done something like this before. Why bother thinking so hard about it? It’s just too easy, not worth starting.

Sometimes, the problem was that the student knew exactly how to solve the problem, but they just had no idea what was going on. Advanced students learn math from all sorts of sources, many of which are not stand-alone sources. For example, if a parent teaches their kid how to use the multiplication algorithm or an algorithm for adding fractions, they probably didn’t teach the underlying concepts (the distributive property; cutting fractions into the same size pieces). Youtube videos, some books, and Russian School of Math are all guilty of this sort of teaching as well. We might need to go back and teach some of those concepts, as the child tells us they already understand it. But if they learned enough algorithms without conceptual background, they might find themselves in a math class teaching material from a year or two before, but still struggling to learn the ideas.

 Or, maybe they are just unhappy for whatever reason, and this is a complaint that they are used to hearing about math.