By the time students reach middle school, most of their instruction and practice will be done on whiteboards, Chromebooks, or with just a piece of paper and a pencil. Gone are the days of organizing base ten blocks or grouping pictures of jelly beans. Numbers, symbols, and variables fill the pages and screens, and if that wasn’t enough, two words: “word problems”.

Students entering 6th grade level math without a concrete foundation will struggle to keep up. If they can’t already divide fluently, adding variables to the mix certainly isn’t going to make them better at it. But what do adults tend to lean toward as the solution?

More practice.

Unfortunately, often that “more practice” is really just the idea that if they repeat the steps over and over they’ll learn it AND get more familiar with the underlying operations at the same time. I know this because when I was teaching 7th grade, I tried it. It felt wrong, but we had a high-stakes state test to teach.

When I took over my 7th grade class, we were almost midway through the year, and I was teaching linear equations to a group of 130+ students, most of whom were still performing addition by counting on their fingers. To make it fun, I took them on pretend field trips to model admission fees as a constant and ride fares as a variable. We did Mild, Medium, Spicy whiteboard races where I pretended that I sold hot dogs on weekends. I put up a massive word wall and hung posters and told them to refer to the walls for answers. We would chant various sayings I came up with thinking it would all make it stick. I stopped doing warm-ups and started doing mental math exercises with them.

And, yes, I gave them homework.

Day in and day out, for the better part of 6 weeks, I spent every ounce of energy I had planning and conducting engaging lessons, creating differentiated practice, pulling small groups to work on their multiplication skills, tutoring before and after school every day. Based on their homework results, and even their participation in class, I really thought almost everyone had mastered the concepts we were learning.

And then came the unit test.

I gave them a study guide the Friday before so they could practice over the weekend. We did a review game in class that saw the highest engagement from them I’d ever seen. They were going into this test confident, and so was I. I intentionally made the test “passable”. Multiple choice, absolutely no trick questions, no confusingly worded word problems – all they had to know was what we had worked on for the past 6 weeks and they would ace it. So you can imagine my utter shock and dismay when the results came in:

60% failed. And failed BIG. The lowest score was a 13.

When I asked individual students about specific questions, most couldn’t spot their errors without prompting. Most couldn’t work out the correct answer.

For context, I’d been observing these classes since the beginning of the school year. I knew going into it on Day 1 that they had mostly failed tests and quizzes, mostly didn’t have any homework, mostly would rather play on their Chromebooks during class than listen or learn. And I truly thought that by changing the pacing, by giving more practice in class, delivering more engaging lessons, taking away Chromebook use during class, and giving homework, I had solved the problem.

Wrong.

Then it dawned on me. Giving them more practice when they didn’t even understand basic math concepts like adding and subtracting or balancing equations was like repeatedly asking them to swim when they’d never been in water before. Okay, maybe not quite the same, but you get the idea. I battled internally with whether or not to just stop teaching the curriculum and start teaching multiplication and division (letting the few who were capable move on to more advanced concepts independently). But, this was public school in Texas, and we had a test to take in a couple of months that would be used to grade the school on its effectiveness, so, disappointed and frustrated, we took the loss and moved on to geometry.

But, what I took away from my short experiment was: There is no amount of practice or drills or chants that can make up for limited math fluency. And the more practice we give without going back and filling gaps, the more we create a false sense of confidence.