When Good Pronouns Go Bad

Pronouns, we all use them: the all-powerful "it," "they," and "them," to name just a few. Pronouns are incredibly useful shortcuts, with well-known rules and any number of applications. Yet, like any tool, pronouns can be overused and misused, and this is where things can go very wrong. In so many ways, the easiest pronoun fixes are found in students’ writing: so many students will use with far too many pronouns as stand-ins for emotional discussion and deeper analysis. It is often a wonderful exercise in self-discovery to unwind those its, theys, and thems. None of what I am pointing out is actually new to most people reading this.  

The surprise for many of our readers, instead, is that we see the most subtle and challenging shortcutting with overuse of pronouns in math.  Most often, students will use pronouns to obscure an area of weakness or something they haven’t had a chance to learn, and the gap goes unnoticed in a classroom. This can be a tremendously successful adaptation for school, and students typically come by this overuse of pronouns honestly.

If we take a minute to consider the average day of our average high school student, the picture is fairly easy to construct: any given student on any given day in any given class is bound to hear one or more concepts from the teacher that is impossible to tease out of the flow, or is perhaps a lower priority for that moment, and that concept will then get the mental labeled “to be sorted out later” and thrown into an out-of-the way mental drawer.  Even with the best of intentions, it is clear that these small gaps and obfuscations are more apt to compound rather than to be examined and understood. In a large class, the teacher may miss it, and the students may promise themselves that they will "catch up later" when they study for the test or to prepare questions for the teacher, but so many of these moments slip by in the chaos of the day. Little misunderstandings fall to the wayside each year and fail to be cleared up, only to be papered over or lost entirely when the topic changes the following year. So many of our students who are high achievers along a majority of essential topics, are still missing critical fluency in things like percents, proportions, averages, will believe that they simply aren't capable of understanding the work. In fact, we find, over and over again, that once we revisit these subjects, and pay real attention to the pronouns we need to listen to, we can uncover the missing pieces, revisit the key concepts, and real learning and comfort will evolve. Soon there is a palace of pronouns built on top of some key detail or concept that has gone missing. Amazingly, we don’t always see a concept get cleared and we never really know what “was missing.” Instead, the sun comes out, we see a burst of confidence, and the feeling that the concept is actually fun.