Why Does My 8th Grader Say Their Math Teacher Is a Cannibal? Middle School Math Anxiety Explained
I was pulling a half-baked frozen pepperoni pizza out of the oven last Tuesday when Javi dumped his math 8 binder on the kitchen table and said, “Mr. Henderson’s definitely a cannibal.” I snort-laughed so hard a string of melted cheese slid off the slice I was holding and landed on my sock. “Excuse me?” I said. He didn’t crack a smile. He just kicked the leg of the chair and flipped to a crumpled worksheet covered in half-erased slope problems, knuckles white around the edge.
Math 8 is the first high school credit algebra class most kids in our district take, and the counselor had sent a generic email a month before warning that this is the year a lot of kids who sailed through elementary math hit a wall, fast. Grades count now, 9th grade course placement depends on it, and the work stops being just adding and memorizing times tables. I’d known Javi was struggling, but he’d brushed off every question with a mumbled “it’s fine” up until that night.
He laid out the evidence the whole 8th grade had compiled: Mr. Henderson never eats in the staff lounge. He keeps the back storage closet by his desk locked at all times. The week before, Tyler from second period had stopped by after school to turn in a late assignment and seen him cutting up something dark red in a tupperware, and when Tyler asked what it was, he’d just shrugged and said “lunch.” The final nail, Javi said, was what happened to him the Wednesday before: Mr. Henderson called on him out of the blue to solve 3x + 7 = 22 on the front whiteboard. Javi froze. He’d gotten every homework problem on that step wrong the night before, couldn’t remember if you subtracted the constant first or divided, and stood there for 17 seconds (he counted) with 32 other kids staring while Mr. Henderson leaned against his desk and waited, no hint, no offer to let him sit down. When Javi finally mumbled he didn’t know, Mr. Henderson just nodded and told him to see him after class. “Mia’s cousin had him three years ago,” Javi said, picking at a pizza crust. “He said he keeps the kids who can’t do slope in the closet.”
My first instinct was to tell him this was the dumbest middle school rumor I’d ever heard, to point out that a cannibal couldn’t teach public school for 12 years without anyone noticing, and send him back to his homework. But I could see how tight his shoulders were, how he’d been avoiding pulling his math workbook out for two weeks straight, and I held back. Instead, I grabbed a root beer from the fridge, pulled out the chair across from him, and said, “Okay, walk me through all of it from the start. What’s the first thing anyone noticed?”
That’s the trick no one tells you about 13-year-olds, I think. They can’t say “I’m embarrassed that everyone else seems to get this and I don’t, and I’m scared I’m stupid and everyone will find out.” That feeling is too big and too raw to say out loud, especially to a parent or a person in charge. So they wrap it up in something silly and loud, something they can laugh about with their friends. A cannibal math teacher is way easier to talk about than the quiet panic of sitting through a 45-minute class where you don’t understand a single word being said.
I emailed Mr. Henderson that night, expecting an eye-roll back or a note that Javi was being disruptive. He wrote back in 20 minutes: “I get the cannibal rumor every three or four years, usually right after we start linear equations. Happy to meet before school whenever works for you.” I showed up at 7:30 a.m. that Thursday, coffee leaking through the side of my travel mug, the hallway still smelling like floor wax and strawberry Pop-Tarts from the vending machine. His room was half lit, and before he even said hello, a yellow lab with gray fur around her muzzle wandered out from the locked back closet, wagging her tail.
That was Mae, 12 years old with bad arthritis and separation anxiety, he explained. His partner works 12-hour shifts at the hospital, so he brings her in a couple days a week, and the closet holds her bed, her water bowl, and her rawhide chews—hence the “mysterious bone” a kid had spotted on his desk the month before. He keeps it locked so groups of rowdy kids don’t wake her up between classes. The dark red stuff in the tupperware? Leftover grilled steak he cuts up for lunch. He eats at his desk because he only gets 22 minutes between the last bell and after-school tutoring, and the staff lounge is always tied up with arguments about copy machine quotas.
We talked for 15 minutes about Javi freezing at the board. Mr. Henderson said he makes a point of waiting kids out instead of rescuing them, because he wants them to get used to being stuck instead of panicking if they don’t have an answer in two seconds. But he admitted he often can’t tell the difference between a kid who’s thinking and a kid who’s paralyzed by embarrassment. We worked out a tiny, no-paperwork signal right there: if Javi has his pencil laid flat eraser-side up during whole-class discussion, he’s okay being called on. If it’s point-down, he’s still working, and Mr. Henderson won’t call on him until he raises his hand. He also agreed to stop by Javi’s desk first during independent work on Wednesdays, when new concepts usually land, to check in before Javi gets frustrated enough to check out entirely.
At home, I changed up my after-school questions too. I stopped asking “did you finish your math homework” which only ever got a grunt, and started asking “what’s the dumbest rumor about your teachers going around this week.” Half the time it’s something about the PE teacher living in the equipment shed, but eventually Javi works his way around to admitting he didn’t understand the day’s lesson. We also made a deal, which Mr. Henderson signed off on: instead of copying answers off a friend’s shared doc or leaving his worksheet blank, Javi can circle up to three problems he can’t solve, write “need two minutes to go over this” at the top, and get full credit for trying.
It’s been two months now. Javi still calls him Cannibal Henderson to his friends, but it’s a joke now, not something he whispers before first period. A couple weeks ago he stayed after school for a quiz retake, and Mae fell asleep on his sneaker while he worked, and he talked about it for three days. He still doesn’t like math. He got a C on his last systems of equations test, and he still groans when he pulls his workbook out after dinner. Last week he told me the rising 8th graders are already asking about the rumor, and he didn’t correct them, just grinned and said “watch out for slope day.”
I don’t know if he’ll ever end up liking algebra, or if he’ll place into the advanced track he needs for the engineering summer camp he wants next year. Some nights the homework still ends with him shoving his binder into his backpack and saying he’s never going to get it. But he doesn’t drag his feet to second period anymore, and he doesn’t lie about missing work. Sometimes the scariest thing about a hard class isn’t the work itself. It’s feeling like you’re the only one who doesn’t get it, and the person at the front of the room is a stranger waiting for you to mess up. A cannibal rumor is just a silly, loud way for kids to say that out loud, before they know how to say it for real.
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