By Sarah Lahm.

I need to thank my son’s teacher for loving him, even when it seems like an impossible task.

She called me the other day, to say he had disappeared for about thirty minutes during school. She hadn’t been able to find him, and then, when she did, she told him he couldn’t come to the YMCA with the rest of the class, as planned, to go swimming.

After I swallowed hard, feeling shame and dread creep up my throat (there have been quite a few phone calls home this year), I thanked her for not letting him go swimming with the class. He has to learn, we both agreed, that he can’t run off like that.

As I suspected, he had run out of class to avoid the day’s math lesson. Trying to teach my boy math, we’ve learned, turns him into a sad, frustrated, angry kid who feels cornered and defeated.

He has math anxiety. I think he developed it last year, when his regular teacher was gone on a leave of absence, and the substitute teacher–who meant well, I am sure–brought a different kind of pressure to bear on the kids than his regular teacher did. The substitute kept the kids in from recess because “they had so much (math) work to catch up on,” and pushed the kids to plow through a bunch of work in order to be on schedule with the Minneapolis Public Schools’ “Focused Instruction” approach, which revolves around frequent benchmark testing.

I cannot say for sure this is what caused my son’s anxiety around math to develop, but it has gotten worse this year.

Thankfully, he has a teacher who knows him very well, or at least tries to. He is an expert button-pusher, and can be tough, stubborn, and disruptive, yet also sweet, kind, and funny. He can read and spell very well, and would prefer to stick to what he feels he’s good at.

And, actually, he’d rather learn Somali from his Somali-American friends at school than sit down and tackle math. (That’s what he was doing when he disappeared from class).

His life goals veer from the puzzling–“The two things on my bucket list are to eat a Twinkie and ride in a limo”–to the more parent-pleasing: “I think I could be an actor. I have a good voice, and I can cry easily.”

He has three siblings, and this year, I have noticed that he has been staying up past his bedtime. When the house gets quiet, and his sisters are tucked away, he wants to talk and be read to. It occurred to me that this–this attention and quiet time–may be what he needs this year, more than math.

It is actually hard to say that and let go of my expectations. But, when his teacher called me the other day, and we discussed his disruptive behavior during math, I suggested that we just forget about math for now.

“Let’s find something else for him to do during math,” I said to her. “Maybe he could go help some younger kids, or do a project instead.”

His teacher agreed with me. He doesn’t take the standardized tests that are rolling out now at his school (I really can’t imagine what they could possibly tell me about him, that his teacher has not yet conveyed to me this year), so I am not concerned that dropping math will affect his score.

I agreed–nervously, as I too once had math anxiety–to work with him on math at home, and over the summer, so that he will be as ready for 5th grade math as possible (this was one of his teacher’s central concerns).

In reflecting on this decision, I have recalled one of my favorite stories about teaching. I first stumbled upon it in the great Parker Palmer book The Courage to Teach. It is about the writer James Baldwin, and his own memories of being a student. Here is Baldwin’s story, about one of his public school teachers:

…the never-to-be-forgotten Mr. Porter, my black math teacher, who soon gave up any attempt to teach me math. I had been born, apparently, with some kind of deformity that resulted in a total inability to count. From arithmetic to geometry, I never passed a single test. Porter took his failure very well and compensated for it by helping me run the school magazine. He assigned me a story about Harlem for this magazine, a story that he insisted demanded serious research. Porter took me downtown to the main branch of the public library at Forty-second Street and waited for me while I began my research.

Baldwin goes on to write this:

The teachers I am talking about accepted my limits. I could begin to accept them without shame. I could trust them when they suggested the possibilities open to me…And when I could scarcely see for myself any future at all, my teachers told me that the future was mine.

Thankfully, for those of us who know and cherish his enduringly powerful work, James Baldwin had teachers who believed in him and showed him that his life would not be determined by his failures.

I must remember to call my son’s teacher and thank her for allowing him to learn the same lesson.

Sarah Lahm taught English for over 10 years. She is now a Minneapolis – based writer who blogs at brightlightsmallcity.com.