I Constantly Kicked Three Girls Out of My Honors Class, and I Had to Ask Why

During my first year of teaching high school math, I had an honors-track class filled with brilliant students who gave me grief almost every day. I loved that class, but whew, they could wear me out. Three girls in particular were best friends, academically competitive in a healthy way, and absolutely hilarious. They were smart, they knew they were smart,

and they knew each other well enough to turn almost anything into a moment. They would interrupt the lesson, joke with one another, and find every possible opening to take the entire class off track.

I had a really strong relationship with them, which probably made the whole thing even more ridiculous because I was constantly putting them outside of my classroom. They would be standing in the hallway looking through the window or trying to plead their case. “Ms. Fraser, no, we’re sorry. We’re going to be good.” Eventually, I would let them back in, and for a little while, they would be good. Then somebody would say something, somebody else would laugh, and before I knew it, we were right back where we started.

At first, I treated it mainly as a behavior issue. They were disrupting my class, so naturally, I focused on stopping the disruption. I needed them to sit down, stop talking, pay attention, and let me teach. But after going through some version of this cycle enough times, I had to start asking myself a different question. Why did these three students have so much mental space available to entertain themselves in the middle of my math class?

That question made me look at my own instruction differently.

These girls were doing the work. They were capable of getting the correct answers. They were academically strong, and mathematics came relatively easily to them. I could continue kicking them out, bringing them back in, and telling them to behave, but at some point I had to admit that their behavior was also giving me information. They had enough mental space to entertain themselves because I was not always challenging them in ways that required their full attention.

That was hard for me to recognize as a first-year educator because I thought I was challenging them. They were in an honors class. The work was advanced. They were completing assignments that were supposed to be rigorous. But I started realizing that assigning advanced mathematics and creating an intellectually demanding mathematics experience are not necessarily the same thing.

They were capable of more than completing an assignment and producing the correct answer. They needed opportunities to explain why something worked, defend their reasoning, make connections between ideas, and think about mathematics in ways where knowing the procedure was not enough. I was still learning how to create those kinds of experiences.

So I started changing what I asked from them.

At one point, I started giving them the answers to their homework. Yes, the answers. I did not care whether they could bring me twenty completed problems with the correct answers circled at the bottom. If I already knew they were capable of getting the answer, then making the answer the entire point of the assignment was not giving me much information about what they actually understood.

Instead, they had to show me their reasoning. They had to explain the decisions they made. They had to demonstrate that they understood the mathematics underneath the procedure. If I gave them the answer, they could no longer treat arriving at that answer as the finish line. The answer became the least interesting part of the work.

And that shift mattered because it changed what I was asking their brains to do. I was no longer just asking, “Can you solve this?” I was asking them to think about how they knew, why their method worked, whether another method would work, and how they could communicate their mathematical thinking clearly enough for someone else to follow it.

The funny thing is, the older I get, the more I realize I should have understood those girls better than I did because I had been one of those students myself.

My freshman year of high school, I did not have behavior problems. I was not disrupting the class or getting put out. I would finish my work quickly, and then my brain needed something else to do. So I would ask for a pass to go to the bathroom, and somehow that bathroom trip would turn into me roaming the hallways.

I did not have language for any of this at 14 years old. I wasn't walking around thinking, “My current learning environment is insufficiently intellectually stimulating.” LOL. I just knew I did not feel like sitting in that classroom anymore. My brain needed activity. Quite frankly, it still does.

But there was another side to all that roaming that I could not see at the time. Teachers who did not teach me saw me in those hallways. Administrators who did not really know me saw me out of class. They were forming impressions of who I was without knowing what was happening inside the classrooms I kept leaving.

I remember getting to the end of that school year and racking up awards because I was at the top of my class. One teacher walked up to me afterward and said, “I didn't know you were smart.”

The shock of it all! This man had apparently been seeing me roaming those hallways all year and had already decided what kind of student I must be. He had no idea I was finishing my work, earning strong grades, or sitting at the top of my class. He knew the version of me he saw in the hallway.

Now, there is another part of that story that I appreciate. Once he found out, he started calling me “Princeton.” That became his name for me for the next three years of high school. Every time he saw me, I was Princeton. In his own way, he started speaking belief into me. He saw possibility for my future and named it out loud before I could fully see it myself.

But reflecting on that experience now, I also think about everything that happened before he started calling me Princeton. He did not recognize me before. He saw a girl in the hallway.

He did not see the student who had already finished her work. He did not see the student whose brain was looking for somewhere else to go. He did not know enough about me to understand the difference between avoiding learning and not being sufficiently engaged by the learning that was happening.

Years later, I was standing in my own classroom looking at three brilliant girls whose disengagement looked completely different from mine. They stayed in the classroom and made their own entertainment. I left the classroom and went looking for mine.

I wish I could tell you that once I figured this out, those three girls suddenly became quiet little angels who never disrupted my class again. Absolutely not. LOL. They were still themselves. They were still funny. They still tested me. I was still learning how to teach, and they were still teenagers.

But they changed the way I thought about what student behavior could be telling me.

Now here’s the mirror. 🪞 Disengagement does not have one look. Sometimes it is loud. Sometimes it is the student making jokes, talking to friends, or finding every opportunity to derail the lesson. Sometimes it is quiet. It is the student who finishes quickly and checks out. Sometimes it is a bathroom pass. Sometimes it is a student physically sitting in your classroom whose mind left twenty minutes ago. And if we only know how to recognize disengagement when it looks like a traditional behavior problem, we may miss what students are actually communicating to us.

Advanced students do not always need more problems, faster pacing, or a heavier workload. And when I say “advanced,” I am not talking about a permanent label that defines what a student is capable of forever. I am talking about students whose current level of understanding means they need something different from the learning experience in front of them. We have language for students who need additional support. We should also be willing to recognize when a student needs greater depth, complexity, or intellectual challenge.

Those three girls needed something different from me. That did not make them better mathematicians than everyone else in the room, and it did not mean they would always need the same thing. It meant that, in that moment, the work I was giving them was not requiring enough of their thinking. But recognizing that they needed something different was only part of my responsibility. I also needed enough subject matter expertise to know where I could take the mathematics next.

That is a piece of subject matter expertise we do not talk about enough. Knowing mathematics deeply is not only about being able to solve the problem yourself. It gives you more places to take students with the mathematics. You can ask a better question. You can change a condition and ask what happens. You can push a student to justify why a strategy works, make a connection they have not considered, compare approaches, defend an idea, or investigate whether something will always be true. The deeper our own understanding is, the more options we have when the mathematics in front of a student is no longer requiring enough of them.

Giving a student who finished ten problems another ten problems is not necessarily rigor. Sometimes all we have done is reward efficiency with more work. Students who have learned how to be successful in mathematics can become very good at doing what we ask without ever having to wrestle deeply with what they know. If our own understanding of the content does not extend much further than the procedure we are teaching, though, it becomes much harder to create that intellectual wrestling without simply reaching for harder problems or moving students ahead to the next topic.

That matters because the students who appear to need us the least can sometimes become the easiest students to overlook. They are getting the answers right. Their grades are good. They finish quickly. They know how to navigate school. From the outside, everything appears to be working. Meanwhile, they may be spending large portions of the day intellectually coasting because we have mistaken successful completion for deep engagement.

And there is another layer here that I think about because of that teacher who told me, “I didn't know you were smart.” We have to be careful about the stories we create about students based on the behavior we can see. A student wandering the hallway can become “unmotivated.” A student talking through class can become “disruptive.” A student who puts their head down can become “lazy.” Sometimes those descriptions may capture part of what is happening, but they are not diagnoses. They do not tell us why.

That does not mean every behavior is evidence that the work is not challenging enough. I do not want us romanticizing inappropriate behavior or placing every classroom management challenge back on the educator. Those girls still had a responsibility to meet the expectations of our classroom. Freshman Jaliyla probably needed to stop roaming the hallways too. LOL. Students need boundaries, expectations, and accountability. But accountability and curiosity can exist together. We can address the behavior and still ask ourselves what information might be underneath it.

Rigor has to mean more than difficulty, and this is another place where our subject matter expertise matters. It has to create opportunities for students to reason, justify, make connections, defend ideas, question assumptions, and encounter mathematics that does not immediately surrender to the strategies that have always worked for them. Creating those opportunities requires us to understand the mathematics beyond the answer ourselves. Sometimes the challenge is not giving students harder mathematics. Sometimes it is knowing the mathematics deeply enough to ask them to think differently about something they thought they already understood.

Those three girls taught me a lot during my first year of teaching, probably more than they realized. They made me think differently about honors mathematics, about homework, about what counts as evidence of understanding, and eventually about rigor itself. My own freshman-year experience helped me understand something else years later: before we decide what a student's behavior says about who they are, we should probably get curious about what it might be telling us about what they need.

I spent a lot of time trying to get those three girls to stop talking. Somewhere years earlier, there were probably adults wondering why I could not stay in class.

Looking back, both experiences remind me that students will find something for their minds to do. Our subject matter expertise gives us more ways to make the mathematics somewhere their minds actually want and need to go.

Rigor is not about making work harder for the sake of difficulty. It is about knowing the mathematics deeply enough to give students something worth using their minds for.

DOPE MATH® in Practice

Those three girls did not need different mathematics. They needed me to change what I was asking them to do with the mathematics.

That's an important distinction. Increasing cognitive demand doesn't always require a new lesson, a harder problem, or more work. Sometimes a small change to a question we are already asking can require students to think more deeply about mathematics they already understand.

Put This Into Practice

1. Ask for justification. Don't stop when students give you the correct answer. Ask, “How do you know?” “Why does that work?” or “Can you prove that will always be true?” Requiring students to justify their thinking shifts the work from getting an answer to making sense of the mathematics behind it.

2. Change a condition. Take a problem students have already solved and change one part of it. Ask, “What if this value changed?” “Would your strategy still work?” or “What would have to be true for your answer to change?” A small change can force students to reconsider the relationships within the mathematics instead of repeating a procedure they already know.

3. Require another representation. If students solved it algebraically, ask them to show it graphically. If they used a table, ask for an equation. If they drew a model, ask them to connect that model to the symbols. Then ask them to explain how the representations are connected.

4. Compare strategies. Put two different approaches in front of students and ask them to compare them. What is similar? What is different? Which is more efficient? Would both strategies always work? Students should not only know how their own strategy works; they should be able to make sense of the mathematical thinking of others.

5. Remove some of your thinking from the task. Look at the questions you're asking and notice where you've already made decisions for students. Did you tell them which operation to use? Which representation to create? Which strategy to follow? Which information matters? Consider what you can remove so students have to make some of those mathematical decisions themselves.

Those three girls taught me that challenging students doesn't always mean giving them something harder. Sometimes the content is exactly where it needs to be. What needs to change is what we're asking students to do with it. That's part of our responsibility as subject matter experts: knowing the mathematics well enough to recognize where we can open it up, push the thinking further, and give students more responsibility for making sense of it themselves.

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