Burning the Math Workbook
A Story About Anxiety, Transformation, and the Teachers Who Made the Difference
I still remember the look on my daughter’s face as the smoke curled upward.
It was the last day of the school year. In our backyard fire pit, she fed the flames page by page from her math workbook, grinning as the paper blackened and disappeared. This wasn’t a one-time ritual. Every June, the math book went into the bonfire.
Math had been a source of shame for her since first grade, when she came home in tears and admitted she’d been caught cheating on a timed math facts quiz. She had been dishonest because she was trying to survive. Despite years of effort and support, her anxiety around math only deepened.
By the time she reached middle school, she had firmly decided: I’m just not a math person.
Then we moved to a new country. Her new school approached math very differently. Her seventh-grade teacher didn’t center memorization or speed. Instead, he focused on thinking—on understanding why an algorithm worked, not just how to execute it. He used pre-assessments to identify missing prerequisite skills and pulled small groups of students for targeted support.
One afternoon, my daughter came home nearly bouncing through the door.
“He told us we’re not stupid for not getting fractions yet,” she said. “We just hadn’t been taught in a way our brains could understand. I think I get it now, Mom.”
With several excellent teachers in a row, math slowly transformed from a source of dread into her favorite subject. She went on to excel at higher-level IB math, earn a computer science degree, and land an internship at a biomedical company doing software development she genuinely loves. Her entire STEM-focused career path hinged on one pivotal shift: developing a growth mindset about math.
A few teachers drastically changed the trajectory of my daughter’s life.
The teachers who helped her move from math anxiety to calm determination shared a few essential mindsets:
High expectations, enthusiasm for their subject
Deep care, including empathy for math anxiety and intentionality around identity
A growth mindset, grounded in the belief that everyone can learn
Specific, actionable feedback, focused on next steps rather than deficits
These mindsets are not mechanical. They are relational, cognitive, and emotional. And they are extraordinarily difficult to sustain under chronic stress.
This is why I argue that a teacher who is burning out cannot foster a truly flourishing classroom. Teaching requires sustained attention, empathy, flexibility, and intentionality: the very capacities that are eroded by burnout.
Just as industrial farming depletes the soil that crops depend on, chronic stress depletes the internal resources teachers rely on to support deep learning.
And just as food grown through regenerative agriculture contains higher nutritional value1, learning cultivated by flourishing teachers is deeper, richer, and more durable.
There is solid science behind this analogy. Chronic stress impairs working memory and cognitive flexibility—the very functions teachers need in order to hold high expectations, respond to student thinking, and offer precise, useful feedback. 2 The research shows that empathy depletion is a second distinguishing feature of burnout.3 Empathy, of course, is exactly what my daughter’s teachers needed to recognize her math anxiety and help her rebuild her identity as a capable learner.
When we invest in educator wellbeing, we aren’t indulging in a “nice-to-have.” We are protecting the conditions that make deep learning possible. 4
A recent report from the University of Oxford put it bluntly:
“It could be argued that the impact of teacher wellbeing is so important to the functioning of a school that it should be one of the first factors that is considered when looking at improving wellbeing across the school community.” 5
Part of why I am so passionate about teacher wellbeing is that I’ve seen its impact from every angle: as a teacher, as a school leader, and as a parent.
I will always be grateful to the math teachers who helped my daughter rewrite her story. Teachers’ impact stretches across generations. They deserve regenerative schools.
Newsletter update:
After six months of trying—and many rejections—I’ve gotten the chance to spend the next few months of my sabbatical year doing a big project that I’m super excited about! I’m trying to practice what I preach about saying no and clarifying my priorities: so I’m going to reduce the frequency of this newsletter to once every few weeks.
Thank you to everyone who reads, comments, and engages. These conversations are both encouraging and illuminating!
Casey, Chris. “Crops grown with regenerative agriculture are healthier, study finds” Food Dive. March 31, 2022. Link
Shields GS, Sazma MA, Yonelinas AP. The effects of acute stress on core executive functions: A meta-analysis and comparison with cortisol. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2016 Sep. Link
Maslach, Christina and Michael P. Leiter. The Burnout Challenge. Harvard University Press, 2022.
The image of the workbook burning is visceral, but what lingers far longer is the quiet truth underneath it: your daughter wasn’t avoiding maths because she didn’t care, she was surviving a system that confused speed with intelligence and struggle with failure.
What your daughter’s teacher did wasn’t lower the bar. He did the opposite. He held high expectations while removing the shame tax that so often comes with learning gaps. Pre-assessing prerequisite knowledge, pulling targeted groups, explicitly naming that misunderstanding isn’t stupidity — these are instructional moves, yes, but they’re also deeply relational acts. They say: I see you, and I’m not giving up on you.
Your link between teacher wellbeing and the capacity to sustain those moves feels absolutely right. In KS3 especially, teaching well is cognitively and emotionally demanding in a way that’s hard to overstate. You’re constantly diagnosing misconceptions, adjusting explanations, managing behaviour, tracking who is quietly lost, and responding to fragile learner identities — often all in the same minute. That work requires working memory, empathy, and patience.
Good luck with your project!
The connection you make between teacher wellbeing and student identity feels absolutely right. When teachers have the bandwidth to see fear instead of failure, kids stop internalizing deficiency and start rebuilding confidence.
Regenerative schools is such a good frame, because learning should grow from nourishment, not survival.