I take my share of the responsibility for asking the student to do something she was not prepared for, so she knows that her mistakes were part of a complex process that involve my explanations, her ability to attend to them, time pressures, her previous knowledge, my knowledge of her math level, and emotional factors.
I’m scared. I’m anxious. I’m worried. I hate math. I’m stressed out.
Fight, flight, or freeze. I’ve learned to recognize all these responses by math students, and gone on from there to take it less personally when students attack me or run from me or disengage. I know it’s not so much me they are reacting to, but to the situation itself.
For some years I would go around the class, asking, "How are you doing? Do you need any help?" and students would say, "Okay," or "No." Usually they kept their work hidden when they answered this way, but often I would find out later that indeed they did need help — they weren’t doing okay at all. Yet they shut me out by saying, "I’m okay." Why do they lie? Because they are running away from whatever mini-lesson I might give them if they admitted they needed help. Because they are running away from the panic they would feel if they worked on math with the teacher.
Sometimes I would invite people to come to see me outside class time to get some extra help, and the answer might be, "No thanks, I’ll work with my tutor (or my father or my girlfriend or…). But I would hear from the tutor that they didn’t show up for a scheduled tutoring session, and I would see no evidence that the alleged sessions with family members bore any fruit. Why would a student invent math learning at some other time? Because they are running away from my math lesson and from panic.
For a while I took it personally, all this running away, but eventually I learned some tactics for heading it off. I no longer ask, "Do you need any help?" Instead I say, "What question are you working on? What can you tell me about your thinking about that question?" or "You don’t look happy. What’s getting you down?" The student can still avoid me if he wants to, but I don’t make it easy for him. If the student is not struggling, this technique invites the student to articulate their math thinking.
Many students who have been dealing with fear of math for a long time have developed a defensive fall-back position, which expresses itself as "I’m no good at math (so I don’t have to try)" or "I can’t do tests (so don’t ask me to)." Another fallback position is to blame the teacher. More situations for me to practice not taking things personally!