Teaching Character in Math Classes

I've received several e-mails from educators regarding how to teach character in a Math class. One specifically asked for lessons that tie together character with Math. But every way I imagine tying the two together seamlessly appears rather artificial; e.g., lessons from the lives of great mathematicians, or integrating a moral into a math word problem.

Example Word Problem:

Problem: Henry was dating Sally. He was also cheating on Sally with Jane. How many girlfriends does Henry have now?
Answer: None. Sally and Jane found out about each other and talked.
Moral? Cheating gets you into trouble.

Hmmm...so maybe this relational triangle could somehow connect to
geometry!

Rather, I think the best way I've seen to integrate character and math was
modeled for me by Dr. William Craig, one of my graduate school professors. In a "History of Philosophy" class, the brilliant professor (two earned Ph.D.'s) would devote 3 to 5 minutes at the beginning of class to a sort of real-life moment. One day, he started class with something like this:

"You know, you can make A's in my class, while flunking in real life. I
remember a time when I was struggling with balancing studies with my
marriage. I was working on my Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of
Munich, Germany. The academic load was overwhelming me. But my teacher pulled me aside and advised me, 'Look around you. People around here with Ph.D.'s are a dime a dozen. But how many people do you see who have a really great marriage? Whatever the cost, don't neglect your relationship with your wife.' It really put things in perspective for me."

Well, that was 25 years ago, and I'm not sure how much today I remember from the history of philosophy. But I'll never forget that simple life story from a teacher who cared as much about my life as about my passing his class.

My advice for leading a Math class? Introduce what you're doing by saying,

"Class, I've been thinking...if I teach so wonderfully that all of you pass
my class with A's and B's, but you flunk out in life, I've not done much to
help you. The infamous Unabomber, who killed people by sending them bombs in the mail, was gifted at Math, having taught Math at a respected university. He made "A's" in Math, but flunked out in life, ending up in prison.

For what it's worth, I'd like to devote a couple of minutes at the first
of class (or on Monday of each week) to discuss some life lessons I've
either learned or am in the process of learning. I'm not saying I'm the
perfect model of these things, but I've come to realize that often my
character has meant more to my success than whether I made an "A" or a "C" in a class."

Then, either tell a story from your life about how you learned the
importance of telling the truth, not cheating, caring about others,
diligence, etc.; or, tell the story of another person whom you respect.
(I've got over 100 of such stories, which I call "Intercom Insights,"
categorized by character trait, with discussion questions, in our members'
section.) Even if you use the story of another person, I'd try to tie it in
to your personal life as well. Students like to know where you stand on
issues.

Of course, much character develop comes from how teachers respect students in class, how they deal with discipline issues, and how they treat students fairly, creating a culture of caring in the class, no matter what subject is being taught. Welcoming student input into the teaching process ("Tell me personally when you think I'm either unfair or teaching poorly.") shows respect for students' opinions and helps prepare them to get customer feedback when they later run a business.

Alternate Introduction to Character

In introducing character to a Math class, here's another introduction
that a teacher could use:

"Mastering this class and making "A's" won't guarantee your success. Studies by the Carnegie Institute of Technology found that "even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15 percent of one's financial success is due to one's technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering -to personality and the ability to lead people." (How to Win Friends and Influence People, p. xiv)

Discussion: Does this mean that Math isn't important? (No. You wouldn't get the engineering job without doing well at Math.) What does it mean? (You need to know more than Math to be successful.)

With this introduction, you understand why I'll occasionally share a life
story or lead a discussion on a character trait or relational issue. In
addition to becoming better students, I hope we become better people."

Change Agent #9: Keep learning about teaching to change lives.

Recommended books:

Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility, by Thomas Lickona (Bantam Books, New York: 1991).

Character Matters: How to Help Our Children Develop Good Judgment, Integrity, and Other Essential Virtues, by Thomas Lickona (Simon & Schuster, New York: 2004).

Building Character in Schools: Practical Ways to Bring Instruction to Life, by Kevin Ryan & Karen E. Bohlin ( Jossey-Bass, San Francisco: 1999).

Also see our collection of articles at www.character-education.info and share your ideas and ask questions on our new forum.

The Character Education Partnership has a blog that many people contribute to. Join the discussion at www.character.org and click on “Join the Discussion on Performance Values” on the left column.

Conclusion

Everyone can be a life-changer. Here’s an example that I wrote for an inner city group:

Who Could Tame George Foreman?
(Or, Security Guards, Hippies, Lunch Room Ladies and Other Life-Changers)

Younger people may know his name from advertisements for the George FOREMAN Grill. Older folks remember him as one of the greatest boxers of all time. In his remarkable lifetime record, he fought 81 times, winning 76 times, 68 of them by a knock out. (1)

At age 19, he fought his way to an Olympic gold medal. In his early 20's, he defeated the seemingly invincible Joe Frazier, knocking him down six times in four rounds to become the heavyweight champion of the world. In his first fight to defend his title, he knocked out his opponent in under a minute, the fastest-ever knockout for a heavyweight championship bout.

Later in life, he needed to raise money for his youth center and decided to show everyone that middle-aged men weren't over the hill. Few believed that he could fight seriously against younger fighters, but he stunned the world by winning fight after fight and finally knocking out the reigning champ at age 45.

Yet, his incredible career may have never gotten off the ground had a few people not believed in him. You see, it wasn't easy to believe in George as a youth. He grew up in a poor home in a poor neighborhood and lived by the law of the jungle, constantly getting into fights to try to prove himself. To get money, he'd mug people on the streets. His friends were so bad that he thought of himself as one of the good boys. After all, he never knifed any of his victims. But anyone who looked at him wrong had better run away fast, or they'd get a taste of the FOREMAN fist. He was was a big bully with a terrible temper. (2)

Fortunately, George ran across people who cared. As a teenager, he moved from Texas to Oregon with the Job Corps, a government program to give young people a chance to work and learn a trade. While he was there, Doc Broadus, who worked with security, saw potential in him as a boxer and helped him to begin training. A fellow Job Corp worker, a hippie from Washington state, shared his Bob Dylan music with George, encouraging him to think about the lyrics, exercise his mind with reading, and to learn to engage people with his words rather than his fists. His teacher reinforced his new zest for learning. For the first time, George fell in love with reading, opening his mind to new worlds. (3)

Then there was Mrs. Moon, the lunchroom lady. You might think, "What kind of influence could a lunch-room lady have on a mean, tough bully? Surely only a tough coach could get through to a person like him." But you see, George had grown up hungry. His mother was so poor that she couldn't afford to give her children enough food. He was too embarrassed to tell anyone and ask for a handout. So back during his school days, he would often blow air into his brown paper sack so that other students would think he had something to eat. If the sack held anything, it might be a mayonnaise sandwich.

So you can see why food was important to George. And the lunch lady controlled the food. So when she told him to straighten up, he listened. She noticed what foods George liked and scooped out a bit extra into his plate. She smiled at him and talked to him. She even invited George home to eat with her family, once a month, every month for six months.

How did this make him feel? According to George,

"Mrs. Moon just made me feel that I was special. She liked me for me. ... Her words echoed in my ears: 'You watch that temper.' The way she said it, smiling and cheerful, I believed she knew something I didn't. And I wanted to do as she said. Most of all, I wanted to please her." (4)

In the final paragraphs of his autobiography, after his huge early success in boxing, establishing a youth center to help young people, and regaining his title late in life, he looked back to remember Mrs. Moon:

"As vividly as if it happened the day before, I remembered the look on Mrs. Moon's face that first time I passed through the lunch line at the Oregon Job Corps center. She smiled at me. That was the moment I decided I was special." (5)

So never say, "I’m just a lunch lady,” or “I’m just a literature teacher,” or “Nobody cares what I think around here.” You never know who's waiting for someone, anyone, to show that they care. A few caring students or staff are today smiling at someone who needs a smile, and in the process are inspiring the next George Foreman or Albert Einstein or Martin Luther King. Never underestimate the power of kindness.

Sources

1) Wikipedia on George Foreman.
2) George Foreman and Joel Engel, By George: The Autobiography of George Foreman (Villard Books, New York: 1995) pp. 3-24.
3) Ibid., pp. 25-41.
4) Ibid., pp. 27-29.
5) Ibid., p. 262.

Change Agent #8: Choose texts that lend themselves to life change.

Here’s a good source:

Books That Build Character, by William Kilpatrick and Gregory and Suzanne M. Wolfe – Three hundred books, from elementary through the teen years, that are especially useful for instilling character.

Change Agent #7: Develop a class culture of caring.

In one survey, only one in four students thought their teachers and fellow students cared about them. Developing a culture of caring models character as well as creates a fertile learning environment. Here are some helpful articles on our site about developing a culture of caring in your class.

Fifty Ways to Show Kids You Care
http://character-education.info/Articles/Showing_Kids_You_Care.htm

Article on improving the school climate:

http://character-education.info/Articles/Climate_Change.htm

Article on developing compassion in students:

http://character-education.info/Articles/instilling_compassion_in_students.htm

A specific way to show caring is to avoid overtly or subtly putting up the “A” students and putting down the “D” students. Some studies show that if you believe your students are smart, they tend to make better grades. The key here is to realize that all kids are smart in their own ways. Some act disinterested and detached because they don’t learn well in an academic setting. Thus, being peer-driven, they’ve got to decide, “Do I continue acting like I’m trying, but keep making poor grades, thus proving that I’m dumb? Or, do I act disinterested so that I might be perceived as smart, but just unmotivated?”

In the final analysis, we don’t really know what those students will become, do we? Dr. Stanley found that most of his highly successful businessmen and accumulators of wealth had a “C” average.

Discussion: Why?

• Perhaps they have a higher emotional IQ, which is an asset to any business venture. Thus, many of them major in extra-curricular activities.
• Perhaps they are more “outside of the box” thinkers, which is not generally rewarded in education.
• Perhaps they are more independent thinkers. They don’t try in a class just because a teacher said it’s important and their parents say it’s important. If they can’t see the benefit of understanding irony in classic literature, they might rather spend the time programming their I-Pods.
• Perhaps academics for academics sake is simply not their interest. In school, my son Benji was singularly unmotivated, constantly pleading sick, always late, etc. But once he began studying auto mechanics he made all A’s and upon graduation from tech school, went to work at Acworth Automotive promptly at 7:30 each morning, working 55+ hour weeks and then on his own car, making big investments with his paycheck. Just because he tended toward being a slacker in school said nothing about how he would perform once he found his niche.
• Perhaps they have styles of learning that don’t work as well in an academic setting. Here’s a scary thought. Dr. Keisha Hoerrner, a personal friend and a professor here at KSU, told me that in a graduate course for educators at UGA, they took a test to discover their learning styles. Interestingly, they discovered that they all shared the same style of learning. That’s more than interesting; it’s scary. It means that they’ll tend to have difficulty understanding people who learn differently.
  

So let’s rethink our use of the word “smart.” It seems to me that the language of smart hasn’t kept up with our understanding of smart. We now know that “emotional IQ” is very different from the IQ we typically measure, yet is perhaps more important for a successful life. We also know that some people can be great memorizers, and thus perform well on tests, but have little ability to apply those facts to real life.

Example: Paul Orfalea, the founder and driving force behind Kinkos is both dyslexic and hyperactive. Because of this, he never learned to read. Yet, he refuses to think of his learning style as a “deficit.” He sees it as an asset. His incredible appetite for getting ideas from his stores, his customers, the competition and wherever he could find them proved to be a successful learning style to run a successful business.

Here are some of the people I graduated from high school with:

• “George,” the biggest goof-off. He’d yell “Wake up!!!” in the hall during class. He seldom did homework and came to the school dance drunk. Now he can speak four languages and has been doing humanitarian work in sub-Sahara Africa for the past 25 years.
• Deborah, just another “flag” in the band. She went into broadcasting and has been host of the Today show and since 1995, Inside Edition. She’s a two-time Emmy award winner and has authored three books so far.
• “Bart,” the biggest hippie. Last I heard was designing helicopters with NASA.
• “Ted,” the biggest nerd. Today he’s with a big-time law firm in Atlanta.
  

So to build a compassionate classroom, avoid mentally dividing the class between winners and losers, smart and dumb. We really have no idea where each of these students will end up.

Change Agent #6: Use character and life skills resources to tie literature insights into real life.

Typically, values education (or, character education, or life-change education) tries to move students through three steps:

Know the good
Desire the good
Do the good

Pointing out a trait like “kindness” in a character in literature helps students to identify or know kindness. Showing how its positively impacted your life and others helps them to desire the good. Giving specific action points and opportunities to live out kindness helps them to do kindness. Through repetition of these acts of kindness, it becomes a part of their lives.

After reading a novel that touches on integrity, you might ask students: “So you think that person’s integrity allowed him to come out on top in the end. Do you think that’s typical of real people?” Students may well respond, “No. It’s the businessmen who lie about their products and lie on their resumes and step all over the small people who get to the top.”

By bringing in outside stories or research, you might respond, “Well, I used to think that as well. But there’s strong evidence to the contrary. When professor Thomas Stanley studied people who were successful at their businesses and accumulating wealth, he asked them what characteristics they attributed their success to. Here’s what they put up at the top….”

In this way, you’ve reinforced integrity with another line of proof, hopefully moving students closer to “desiring the good.”

So where do you find information like this – stories and facts that motivate students to pursue various traits? I have a vast and growing collection at www.character-education.info . Sign in, choose an alternative payment (not credit card) and say that you were in my seminar. I’ll activate your account free of charge. Take it free for a year. Download what you want. We’re a not for profit. We’re just trying to get the information out there.

Change Agent #5: Open your life in appropriate ways.

Don’t try to be perfect. Both you and your students know you’re not. My pastor is great at pointing out his own imperfections. People love it because they know he’s in the process like the rest of us.

If you’re discussing a character trait, admit times you blew it that hurt you. Then tell times you did it right that helped you. Sometimes it won’t take but two minutes. But adding your personal stories can be powerful. (Just don’t share personal information that you wouldn’t mind your supervisors or the student’s parents hearing. If they story’s good, it’ll probably make its rounds!)

Two ways to use personal stories:

a. Tie them seamlessly into the literature.

Example: In today’s assignment, the protagonist was caught lying. Let me give an example of a predicament I faced in my own life….

b. Have a weekly “success moment.”

(Why speak of “success” rather than “character”? Because “success” is more of a felt need than “character. And if they’ve seen character education done poorly in the past, they might turn it off.)

One of my graduate school professors, Dr. William Craig, was a great model for me in this area. In a "History of Philosophy" class, the brilliant professor (two earned Ph.D.'s) would devote 5 minutes at the beginning of class to a sort of real-life moment. I don’t recall if it was every day or once a week or every now and then. But I’ll never forget one day, when he began class with this nugget:

"You know, you can make A's in my class, while flunking in real life. I remember a time when I was struggling with balancing studies with my marriage. I was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Munich, Germany. The academic load was overwhelming. My main professor would keep pulling out books in French and German that he said were must-reads for my dissertation.

So I talked to a professor about my struggle with balance and he advised me, 'Look around you. People around here with Ph.D.'s are a dime a dozen. But how many people do you see who have a really great marriage? Whatever the cost, don't neglect your relationship with your wife.' It really put things in perspective for me."

Well, that was 25 years ago, and I'm not sure how much I remember today about Kant and Hegel. But I'll never forget that simple life story from a teacher who cared as much about my life as about my passing his class.

Change Agent #4: In analyzing literature, allow for reflection on real life.

Educator Dr. Howard Hendricks complained that so much of education was simply transferring a set of notes from the teacher to the student, without going through the minds of either. (Teaching to Change Lives, by Howard Hendricks)

To avoid this with any given text, prep students with ideas like this:

“As you read this book, think about your own life and jot down ideas and questions.”

This takes students beyond “the intention of the author.” It forces us to think and transform knowledge into wisdom. Here are some sample questions that move into life-examination:

Romeo and Juliet

1. What were the names of the feuding families? (Montague and Capulet)
2. How might this story have ended differently had these families been tolerant and forgiving rather than feuding?
3. Although we don’t know from the story, how do you think that this feud might have begun?
4. Do you think the feuding would stop after the Romeo and Juliet’s death? Why or why not?
5. Imagine that you were a member of one of the families prior to Romeo and Juliet’s deaths. What could you have done to stop the feuding?
6. What makes our prejudices so hard to overcome? (Pride, inability to forgive, repeated acts of unkindness by the other party)
7. Imagine that this story was retold about a girl and guy on our campus (or in our city). What two feuding groups might they belong to? (Hispanic versus White, White Versus Black, Band versus Jocks, Alternative versus Preppie, Rich versus Poor, etc.)
8. What kinds of consequences could take place down the road if these feuds aren’t put to rest?
9. What can we do personally to help bring peace among these groups?

(Two example lessons based on literature: www.character-education.info , members section, see Romeo and Juliet and Twelve Angry Men.)

Benefits of “life questions”:

1) It pulls in the practical students who are motivated by “why should I be studying this?”

As a professional researcher and writer, I’ve never fallen in love with words. Instead, I fell in love with wisdom and reading was simply one of the easiest ways to find it. Besides reading, I’m also liable to ask a good mechanic how he learned his skill or the radiologist, “what does that tube thingy do?”

Questions like these can pull in the practical students - those who aren’t into reading for reading’s sake, but will read to get information. That’s me. If you say, “Steve, you’ve just got to read this novel, it’s captivating!” I won’t read it. If you say, “Steve, this author uses the best analogies I’ve ever seen!” I’ll read the first five pages to observe and understand her technique. But if you say, “This book takes the latest scientific studies of learning and applies them practically to helping learning disabled and unmotived to achieve,” I’m all over it.

So for learners like me, you’ll inspire me by telling me, not that Jurassic Park had a cool story line, but that “it warned me very specifically about how things can get out of hand when I ignore wise counsel.”

2) It pulls in the creative, outside of the box thinkers.

Some of these students don’t “get” the grade thing. Perhaps these are the “C” students, identified by professor Stanley in his studies of successful entrepreneurs. This group of students might relish taking knowledge from one area and applying it to real life.

Hint: Have them write it out answers before discussing, or discuss it in a small group first, to get more class discussion. Many aren’t good at coming up with comments “off the top of their heads.” Others are scared that they’ve misunderstood the question and are afraid of looking stupid. So giving them some time to get their thoughts together makes it safer for them to discuss in front of the group.