My Students Didn’t Do the Project, and I Cried Before Lunch

It was my 2nd year teaching high school math, and I had spent nearly a month preparing my students for a math project. Then my fifth-period class showed up, and most of them had not done it.

I was hurt. I remember standing at the front of the room trying to hold back tears because I could not understand how we had spent all that time preparing and still ended up here. I was also holding back tears because my TA was there, and God forbid this grown woman see me cry because my students didn’t do their project. LOL. I was imagining her doing an Allen Iverson-style press conference, repeating, “Projects??! I mean, we’re talking about projects. Why is she crying?”

But the thing is, we worked on this project for weeks. We went over the expectations, completed check-ins, reviewed examples, answered questions, and worked through every piece I thought they would need to feel successful. I was excited about this project because it felt different from the work they were typically asked to complete. It required more from them. They had to plan, think, make decisions, manage their time, and ultimately create something that demonstrated what they understood. I knew it was ambitious, but I thought I had prepared them for it. I had done everything I thought a good educator was supposed to do to set students up for success, and there I was looking around the room at a whole lot of blank stares.

And yes, I cried. The ugly cry. The Tyra Banks “We were all rooting for you” cry.

Part of it was disappointment, but if I am being truthful, part of it was probably embarrassment too. I had put so much of myself into creating this experience for them that their lack of completion felt personal. Somewhere in my head, I had connected the success of the project to whether I had done a good job preparing them. When they did not show up with what I expected, I immediately started questioning what I had done wrong.

Lunch came and went, and I was still carrying all of that when my seventh-period class entered the room.

Now, this class was filled with freshman boys. A lot of them were popular, several played football, and apparently news traveled very quickly through that school because they walked into my classroom already knowing my business.

“Ms. Fraser, we heard you were crying because those kids didn’t do your project.”

Of course they laughed at me first. Because why would they miss an opportunity like that?

Then they said, “But guess what? We did ours!!!!!!!!”

Y’all, and they had.

Most of them had completed the project, and I was so proud of them. I remember looking through what they had created and feeling all of that disappointment from earlier start to shift.

Now, I am not going to hold you. Those projects were not good. LOL.

They were rough. Some were incomplete in places. Some students had clearly misunderstood pieces of what I was asking them to do. The quality was nowhere near what I had pictured when I spent that month planning the assignment.

But you know what? They did it.

That mattered because I had to remind myself what I was actually asking these students to do. For many of them, this was the first time they had been asked to complete something that required this much planning, independence, sustained effort, and responsibility outside of the usual rhythm of classwork. I had spent weeks preparing them for the content and the requirements of the project, but some of the skills required to successfully complete it were skills they were still developing.

That realization changed the way I looked at what was sitting in front of me. I could have focused entirely on everything that was wrong with their projects. There was plenty. Instead, I gave them credit for showing up and completing something that was difficult for them, and then I sat down and gave each student individual feedback on how to make the work better. I mean, I pulled a desk into the hallway and had 1-on-1 appointments with each one of them. Their effort deserved to be acknowledged, but acknowledging effort did not mean lowering the standard. I did not have to choose between encouraging them and being honest about the quality of their work.

They needed both. They needed to hear, “I see what you did here.” They also needed to hear, “Now let me show you how we make this stronger.”

That experience stayed with me because it forced me to think differently about what happens when we ask students to do work they have never been asked to do before. As educators, we can become so familiar with the skills required to complete a task that we stop noticing how many separate decisions a student has to make along the way. We see the final project. They are experiencing everything required to get there.

Now here’s the mirror. 🪞 We say we want students engaged in rigorous, meaningful mathematics. We want them solving complex problems, creating, reasoning, explaining their thinking, persevering, working independently, and producing something beyond another worksheet. But when we finally give them that opportunity, we cannot treat their first imperfect attempt as evidence that they are incapable of doing it.

Robust tasks require more than an assignment sheet and a deadline. Students have to learn how to plan. They have to learn how to manage something that cannot be completed in one sitting. They have to learn how to revise work they thought was finished. They have to learn how to receive feedback without interpreting it as failure. They have to develop the confidence to keep going when what they produce the first time does not look like the example we showed them. And sometimes, we have to learn how to tolerate the messiness of watching them develop those skills.

That part can be difficult for educators because we know what good work looks like. We can see every missing piece immediately. We know where the reasoning could be stronger, where the mathematics needs more precision, and where the final product falls short of the standard. But this is also where subject matter expertise matters. The deeper we understand the mathematics, the better equipped we are to look at an imperfect piece of student work and determine what it is actually telling us. Is the student missing a prerequisite idea? Is the reasoning mathematically sound but poorly communicated? Is there a misconception underneath the error? Does the student understand the concept but need support with precision? Subject matter expertise helps us move beyond simply identifying what is wrong and toward understanding what the student needs next.

That distinction matters because feedback should do more than point out mistakes. If the only thing students experience after taking an academic risk is a list of everything they did wrong, we should not be surprised when they become reluctant to take the next one. Our knowledge of the mathematics should help us give feedback that moves students forward, not simply prove that we can recognize where their work fell short.

This does not mean we celebrate unfinished or low-quality work as mastery. I did not look at those projects and pretend they were excellent because my students had tried hard. Effort and mastery are not the same thing. High expectations still matter. Quality still matters. Mathematical understanding still matters. But high expectations without meaningful feedback only tell students how far they are from the destination. They do not necessarily teach them how to get there.

That day taught me that there is a space between accepting poor-quality work and expecting students to produce excellence on their first attempt. That space is where teaching happens, and subject matter expertise gives us more tools to navigate it. The more deeply we understand what we teach, the more intentional we can be about what we ask next, what feedback we give, what misconception we address, and how we help a student move from where they are toward deeper understanding.

We acknowledge the attempt. We study what the student produced. We give specific feedback. We help them revise. We show them what quality looks like. Then we give them another opportunity to get closer to it.

Looking back, I think my fifth-period class and my seventh-period class were teaching me the same lesson in two different ways. Some students had not yet learned how to get themselves across the finish line. Others had made it across, but what they produced showed me how much more teaching still needed to happen. Neither group was the finished product.

And neither were those projects.

Those rough projects were not the final evidence of what my students could do. They were the first evidence that they were willing to try.

And once students are willing to try something difficult, our job is not simply to tell them whether they got there. Our subject matter expertise should help us understand what they need next and guide them from effort toward deeper mathematical understanding.

DOPE MATH® in Practice

It is easy to look at an unfinished project, an incorrect solution, or work that falls far below what we expected and make a judgment about what a student can do. But student work gives us information. Our job is to know enough mathematics—and enough about our students—to figure out what that information is actually telling us. Before we lower the rigor, abandon the task, or decide a student simply isn't ready, we need to figure out where the breakdown actually happened.

Put This Into Practice

1. Check the mathematical understanding. Look past the final product. What mathematics does the student actually understand? What can you see in their work that tells you they understand the concept, even if the finished product doesn't demonstrate it well?

2. Check the reasoning. Ask the student to explain their thinking. A wrong or incomplete answer doesn't always mean the reasoning was wrong from the beginning. Find the point where their thinking stopped making mathematical sense.

3. Check the communication. Sometimes students understand more mathematics than their work shows. Can they explain their thinking verbally but struggle to write it? Can they solve the problem but struggle to organize or represent their ideas? Don't automatically treat a communication issue as a mathematics issue.

4. Check the demands beyond the mathematics. What else did the task require? Planning? Time management? Organization? Independence? Revision? Sustained attention? Those were some of the very skills my students were still learning when I assigned that project.

5. Check whether they have had an opportunity to get better. Have they received specific feedback? Do they know what quality looks like? Have they had an opportunity to revise? A student's first attempt doesn't have to be our final judgment of what they can do.

When those boys handed me those projects, I could see everything that was wrong with them. And there was plenty. LOL. But my job wasn't just to identify what was wrong. My subject matter expertise had to help me figure out what they understood, what they didn't understand yet, and what I needed to do next. A rubric can tell students where their work falls short. Our expertise should help them figure out how to move forward.

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